The ICA London will host Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Laura Lima’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Running from 26 January to 29 March 2026, The Drawing Drawing will feature a series of performative installations across the Upper and Lower Galleries, offering UK audiences a rare opportunity to engage with her distinctive, boundary-pushing practice.

Lima has spent over two decades creating works she terms “images”, pieces that defy easy categorisation as performance, installation, or film. Beginning famously in the mid-1990s with a cow released on Ipanema Beach, her practice explores the transformation of matter and concept into concrete reality. Iconic works such as Man=flesh/Woman=flesh use humans and animals as instruments of precise, repeated actions, while series like Costumes, Gala Chickens, and Flexible Gold challenge conventional ideas of ornament, questioning what is deemed essential or decorative.

For The Drawing Drawing, Lima reimagines the life-drawing class, blurring the distinction between viewer and artwork. In the Lower Galleries, Ascenseur (2013) presents a performer partially hidden by architectural elements, while the Upper Galleries feature a dynamic tableau in which objects move through space, transforming drawing into a choreography of the unexpected. With her signature mix of humour, subtle anarchy, and conceptual rigour, Lima’s work invites reflection on the unseen labour and structures that support cultural institutions, expanding the very definition of art.

Image: Laura Lima, Ascenseur, 2013/2016, Art Basel 2016. Image courtesy the artist.