Kim Gordon opens first painting show in Brazil at São Paulo gallery

Kim Gordon, the 73-year-old artist, singer and songwriter who co-founded Sonic Youth, opens her first exhibition of paintings in Brazil this Saturday, June 14, at the Mazzucchelli Cardoso gallery in São Paulo's Cerqueira César neighborhood. Admission is free, and Gordon will attend the opening.

The show, titled "O avesso [The inside out]," fills the gallery's vitrine and main hall with roughly 15 works. Gordon paints in acrylic, portraying young women in compositions that shift between humor, sarcasm and ghostly atmospheres. The paintings use oval frames that recall mirrors and deliberately imperfect brushwork — an approach that evokes the lo-fi aesthetic of her musical career.

Who else is in the show?

The exhibition pairs Gordon's work with paintings by the Argentine artist Valentina Liernur. The two operate differently, and the contrast is the point. Gordon focuses on the representation of women. Liernur takes images of bows associated with delicacy and combines them with soiled fabrics and torn surfaces to dismantle ideals of perfection. The project includes a critical text by the writer Giovana Madalosso.

What does this change for Gordon's standing in Brazil?

It marks a first: before this show, Gordon had never exhibited paintings in the country, despite a long history in the visual arts. Her exhibition record includes the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. For Brazilian audiences, the show converts a reputation known mostly through music into something they can see on a wall, in person, for free.

Gordon is not a newcomer to São Paulo, however. She visited the city in June 2025 on the tour for her album "The Collective." In March of this year she released her third solo album, "Play me," which mixes industrial music and trap with criticisms of American society.

Sonic Youth, the band she co-founded, ended in 2011.

The claim worth stress-testing is the word "first." The announcement presents the show as her first painting exhibition in Brazil; it says nothing about earlier video, performance or installation work in the country, and the distinction matters. What is documented is that these roughly 15 acrylic paintings, with their mirror-like oval frames and imperfect strokes, have not been shown in Brazil before.

What the source does not say is how long the exhibition runs, whether any works are for sale, or what they might cost. Free entry is confirmed; everything beyond Saturday's opening remains unspecified.

For now, the concrete facts stand: 15 works, two artists, one critical text, one opening with the artist present, in a neighborhood gallery in São Paulo — and, from Saturday, a new chapter in Gordon's four-decade career between music and paint.