Leonilson at Lisson Gallery: A Short Career in Assemblage, Paint and Thread

Lisson Gallery in Chelsea is showing works by the Brazilian artist José Leonilson (1957–1993), who died at 36 and left behind a body of work remarkable for its range. The presentation, organized with Projeto Leonilson and Almeida & Dale, follows his development from mixed-media assemblages of the mid-1970s, through the stylistically varied drawings and paintings of the 1980s, to the small embroidered pieces made after his HIV diagnosis in 1991.

Born in Fortaleza and raised in São Paulo, Leonilson came of age as Brazil's twenty-one-year military dictatorship ended in 1985. He is counted among the leading figures of Geração 80, the generation that revived painting alongside peers such as Leda Catunda and Beatriz Milhazes. He drew on the experimentalism of Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel, moving away from 1960s conceptualism toward a more poetic and subjective language.

Textiles sit at the center of the show. The son of cloth merchants, he recalled his mother embroidering at home every day as a formative influence. Mirro [Mirror] (1975) places a fragment of jeans and embroidered felt inside a shallow glazed wooden box, suggesting a reliquary or a Joseph Cornell shadow box. Frequent trips to Europe and the United States in the 1980s brought him into contact with Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf. A 1980 watercolor, Untitled, shows glittering water and distant hills through windowpanes, capturing the pull between introspection and curiosity about the world.

In his last years, unable to use toxic paints, he worked smaller, turning to embroidery and drawing on felt, velvet, silk, taffeta and plain cotton sheets. Works on view include the 1990 thread piece [Origins; Fantasy; Pleasure; Allegory], El puerto (1992), stitched on striped cotton and set in a mirror frame, O preço (1992), and the large 1985 Robe de soir on cut checkered wool. Maps, vessels, windows, bodies and handwritten text recur as symbols of longing, vulnerability, spirituality and belonging.

His work is held by MoMA, LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou and Tate, among others, and MASP in São Paulo mounted a major solo show in 2024. The exhibition gives New York viewers a close look at a language that holds ambiguity and intimacy, pleasure and pain, freedom and restraint together.