Leca Araujo

Leca Araujo (born 1973 in São Paulo, Brazil) is a Brazilian artist based in Geneva. She is known for bringing social and sustainability themes into paintings and art installations, in a bold mix of different types of paints with recycled materials.
==Early Life and career==
Born into a family of architects and designers, Araujo was exposed to different types of art, materials, and media from an early age. Her first works, developed around the age of 10 in an atelier inside a small town of São Paulo (Pirassununga), feature charcoal on paper, pyrogravure and oil painting on wood, in a more classic style.
Having heard that art would never pay her bills, she goes to pursue her creativity in other parallel worlds. She graduates in technology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, but stands a passion for human behavior, a subject that she will explore in her artworks.
In 2011, she starts her first contemporary works. That year, the first essay in the series "Les Jardins" appears, with the creation of the work "Os invertebrados".
The birth of her son Luca, as well as other events in her life, motivates Araujo to use art as a tool to encourage the construction of a more balanced world. That’s when she feels the need to incorporate recycled elements and social themes.
The artist does not classify her work as sustainable or ecological, but as an appeal for balance in a world of dualities.
Between 2017 and 2018, her pieces from the "As Marias series" gained notoriety by addressing sustainability, gender equality and social inclusion in an exhibition at the UN Palace Geneva during the Human Rights week.https://europeanculturalcentre.eu/var/gallery/file/6259a6948597c8e49bd286c5a9e2c1b5.pdf
The series then runs through exhibitions in several European countries, biennials, and important shows, such as Personal Structures, in the context of the Venice Biennale.
In 2020 she wins an award from the Director General of the UN Geneva in a contest promoted for the 75 years of the UN, with the work Maria Bertha.https://annewoelk.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/the_future_we_want_small.pdf 
In 2022 she comes again with a solo exhibition at the Un Palace, this time with an embroidery of paints, fabrics and different objects on recycled doors, windows, and drawers. According to the artist, these artifacts symbolize choices we make every millisecond. In her perception, through the reuse of materials, the pieces bring with them the energy in which they were immersed in their previous setting.
The exhibition, entitled “Between Mind and Matter”, within a combination of concepts from quantum mechanics, hermetic philosophy, and Jungian psychoanalysis, evokes the symmetry between the mental and material worlds.https://www.ceja.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Bilan-de-la-50ème-session-du-Conseil-des-droits-de-lhomme.pdf
Participating in various social projects since her youth on the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Araujo says that: “Awakening people to the power they must create their own reality through their minds is worth more than a thousand social projects. Art has this power to make us look inside, to heal, to awaken.”
Her works, sometimes compared to those of the artist Beatriz Milhazes, bring the typical Brazilianness of her origins in her coloring.
==Exhibitions==
Among the main exhibitions that hosted the works of Araujo are:
* Carrousel du Louvre – Paris, France
* UN Palace – Geneva, Swizerland
* Personal Structures – Venice, Italy
* Biennale di Firenze – Florence, Italy
* Biennale de Lyon, Plateforme Résonance (O Grito) – Lyon, France
* Bienal das Artes – Brasilia, Brazil 
* Gasometer Museum – Triesen, Liechtenstein
* CasaCor – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
==Awards and honours==
* The Future we Want, United Nations 75th anniversary, UN Geneva(2020)
Category:1973 births
Category:People from São Paulo
Category:Federal University of Rio de Janeiro alumni
Category:Brazilian people
Category:Artists