MAASTRICHT.- The exhibition the fifth floor by BACA winner Laura Lima is in continual motion. Since its opening on 26 September, the exhibition rooms have gradually filled up with paintings. Each of which has its own tailor-made suit. Every day throughout the exhibition period, two experienced tailors work in the museum's sewing workshop on Laura Lima's ideas and designs. Each week, new suits are tailored for the paintings and exhibited as abstract portraits in the adjacent rooms. Visitors can make the acquaintance of Carmen, Jaime, Jan, Miro and Chrisóstomo, for example. The groundbreaking exhibition that instigates an innovative dialogue with museum practices has been developed by Laura Lima especially for the Bonnefantenmuseum . New portraits will be shown until 11 January 2015.

Sleeping Beauty in the museum
Doped/Dopada 03.12.2014 – 11.01.2015
From Wednesday 3 December 2014, another special work has been added to Laura Lima's exhibition. A young woman, dressed in a very long white robe lies asleep in one of the museum rooms, after taking a sleeping draught. Her head is wrapped in a red crocheted ornament that is attached to the wall of the exhibition space. The lady sleeps there throughout the opening hours of the museum. Viewers are confronted by an unusual scene that raises all sorts of questions about the possible manifestations of art in the museum and about the relationship between form and content in an artwork.

Doped/Dopada (1997) is currently part of the collection of the Inhotim Institute in Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Laura Lima
Laura Lima studied art at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage and philosophy at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. 'Poetry, reason, meaning, madness, language, existence and power' are the keywords Lima uses herself to describe her art. She manipulates the bodies of people and animals with her ornamental philosophy - decorating the bodies as it were, and thus giving them another meaning, which is often experienced as strange, absurd, amusing, curious and sometimes monstrous.

Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art (BACA) 2014
The Bonnefantenmuseum has been organising the biennial Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art since 2000. The Bonnefanten Award is a tribute to a living artist with an exceptional oeuvre and a demonstrable influence on other artists – a real artists' artist. The BACA consists of a sum of 50,000 Euros, a publication and a solo exhibition in the Bonnefantenmuseum.

The BACA 2014 was awarded unanimously to the Brazilian artist Laura Lima by an international selection committee. The committee for the 2014 edition comprised: Stijn Huijts (director of the Bonnefantenmuseum), Victoria Noorthoorn (director of the Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires), Ivo Mesquita (director of the Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paulo), Alfred Pacquement (Honorary Director of the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris) and Cristiana Tejo (independent curator, Recife). The selection committee had a difficult task, in view of the high standard of visual art from Latin America. The committee commended the exceptional quality of Lima's work and her great influence on other artists.

Artist's book
The artist's book is an important part of the BACA, and it is also an artwork by Laura Lima. As for her series Ouro Flexíveis (Flexible Gold), in which the artist used gold ink to adapt reproductions of classic artworks from the Renaissance and other periods, Lima decided to make a book out of another book, using the Bonnefantenmuseum's catalogue Collection of Dutch and German painting 1500-1800. The book is a co-production by the Bonnefantenmuseum and the Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires. It is available from the Museum Shop and the Bonnefanten Webshop for 24.95 Euros.