Renata Lucas (Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, 1971) is recognized for her incisive interventions in architectural structures and urban, institutional, or domestic spaces. Her work investigates the ways in which the built environment influences social behavior, proposing spatial displacements that reveal and reconfigure conventions surrounding property, utility, and coexistence.
By merging public and private, interior and exterior, Lucas subverts conventional logics of occupation and circulation, creating situations marked by ambiguity and surprise. Her interventions—often subtle at first glance, yet always charged with implications—introduce fractures in established norms, opening up cracks through which to imagine and negotiate new ways of living, inhabiting, and sharing common space.
Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo (2024), Performance Space New York, New York (2019); Secession, Vienna (2014); Peep- Hole, Milan (2011); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2010); Gasworks, London (2007); and Redcat, Los Angeles (2007).
Lucas has created site specific works for the 8th Biennale internationale d’art contemporain de Melle (2018), dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011), the 53rd Venice Biennial (2009) and the 27th São Paulo Biennial (2006). She was the recipient of the Absolut Art Award (2013), the Dena Foundation Art Award (2009) and the Ernst Schering Foundation's Art Award (2009).