We are very pleased to announce that the work “Notas de Esquecimento n.13” by Iris Helena has been incorporated into the collection of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
Born in Paraíba and based in Brasília, Iris Helena (b. 1987) develops a practice that brings together critical, philosophical and poetic dimensions centred on the urban landscape. Her work is distinguished by the incorporation of images on precarious and ordinary supports, which challenge ideas of permanence and instability.
The artist has received significant recognition, including the FOCO Bradesco Award, the PIPA Online Award, as well as prizes in national biennials and salons. Her work is held in important collections in Brazil and abroad.
We would like to thank the collector Marcia Lerro Pimenta for the donation of the work during Sp-Arte 2026.
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About the work
Notas de Esquecimento n. 13 forms part of the eponymous series in which Iris Helena investigates, with both sensitivity and conceptual rigour, the tensions between memory and erasure, permanence and transience. Drawing on urban images captured during her movements [1], the artist constructs visual compositions from post-it notes — fragile, everyday supports that are, paradoxically, intended to prevent forgetting. As Agnaldo Farias observes, the artist’s production is grounded in a “dialectic between destruction and construction, remembrance and forgetting” [2], highlighting the impossibility of fully fixing memory. In Notas de Esquecimento n. 13, this condition manifests both in the choice of material — ephemeral and prone to disappearance — and in the very structure of the work, which suggests the instability of images and the inevitable erosion of memories over time.
In this way, the work articulates a reflection on urban space as a repository of individual and collective histories. The scenes depicted are not merely documentary records, but fragments of an intimate experience, reconfigured by the artist into a visual field that oscillates between recognition and dissolution. The repetitive gesture of attaching and layering Post-it notes alludes to the human attempt to organise and preserve experiences, while simultaneously exposing their fragility.
Situated within a broader practice that encompasses photography, installation, and the appropriation of ordinary materials, Notas de Esquecimento n. 13 reaffirms the artist’s interest in the symbolic weight of her supports. By transforming banal objects into carriers of memory, the artist redirects the viewer’s gaze towards that which, at first glance, appears disposable, inviting reflection on the value (and fragility) of the narratives that shape both urban and personal experience. In this sense, the work not only evokes memory but stages its own process of loss, suggesting that to remember is also, inevitably, to forget.
[1] In this work, in particular, the image displayed is a photograph taken by the artist herself in 2012 of the historic center of João Pessoa, her hometown in the state of Paraíba.
[1] Iris Helena’s trajectory has established itself as one of the most consistent bodies of work addressing the dialectic between destruction and construction, remembrance and forgetting, present/past/future. Her notable point of departure: urban scenes printed on a myriad of Post-it notes—small self-adhesive sheets, yellow and pink—which we obsessively and compulsively affix everywhere in an attempt to avoid forgetting. This suggests that there may in fact be no solution, and that we will be buried beneath the fragile and evanescent matter of the memories we wish to retain. [Excerpt from a critical text by Agnaldo Farias, curator of the exhibition “Práticas de Arquivo Morto – Notas”, Iris Helena’s solo show held at Caixa Cultural São Paulo between November 2019 and January 2020.]
