Alexandro Auler

In spite of the poetry in the images of his beach series of Brazil’s largest shantytown (favela), the Rocinha, Alexandro Auler’s references are definitively documentary. As influences, he credits Juca Martins, the Portuguese humanist photographer who moved to Brazil, documenting the last four decades of Brazilian history; the Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths, known for his coverage of the Vietnam War; and the celebrated Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa, who covered the most important conflicts of the first half of the 20^th century.

Igor Gomes

What might Salvador Dali (Spain), René Magritte (Belgium) and Edward Hopper (USA) – the three names that photographer Igor Gomes cites as personal artistic references – have in common? We are almost obliged to conclude: a certain solitude, loneliness, exclusion. Very different artists, with very different styles, but all provide representations of that exclusion, apparent feature of the contemporary world. All have influenced the eye of this self-trained photographer, who makes the metropolis his principal subject.

James Rowland

Adriana Queiroz

Paulo Ricardo

Rones Dumke

Rones Dumke's works are influenced by areas and subjects such as metaphysics, philosophy and theosophy: they appear to be attempts to describe some basic fundamental causes or principles – the basic structure. They remit to philosophical doctrines – some, mystical or speculative – which appear to seek in nature knowledge of the divinity, origin, purpose of the world. From his interest in the hermetic tradition and alchemy, Dumke seems to have inherited a quest for harmony of opposites. “I see art as a metaphorical poem and an intellectual act that establishes...

Rose Osório

Tuca Ahlin

Malu Brandão

Malu Brandão takes us to the worlds of the post-impressionists George Seurat and Paul Signac – practitioners of pointillism – who formed a bridge to the Expressionists. Pointillism employed the construction of an optical image in the viewer’s mind from adjoining shapes or points of color. Malu has a similar quest for distancing from the detail to arrive at an abstraction: she gives herself up to her unconscious mind and creates by navigating inside a game of lights and colors, with some exploding brushstrokes in which light surges out from an ambience...

Marco Rocha

With a little push from the universe, you can't run away when you're predestined. Owner of the surname Rocha (rock in Portuguese), Marco discovered early on his ability to carve in noble stones and rocks. “What arouses my interest in the Medieval Era are the shapes, axes, helmets and shields. Everything that was forged has an exquisite design", says. Marco opened his studio of monumental sculptures in Florianópolis, state of Santa Catarina, in 2006. He participated in several national exhibitions, such as in Sapiens Park, at CCBB in Rio de Janeiro; and internationally, in Chile, Uruguay and in a series of galleries in Argentina.

Daniel Malta

Armando Merege

In the words of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus: “The only thing permanent is change.” It is on the waves of change that plastic artist Armando Merege navigates with fluidity. His work is always a comment on what is happening around him – a film, a book, a visit to an exhibition: these are only some of the factors that influence his creative process. As if they were annotations, he creates a series of signs and images coming from this, his symbolic universe, permeated with changes. He sees his art work as on a tenuous line between figurative and abstract. 

Gilberto Junior

Txai Costa

Juliana Bambii

Juarês Matter

Liberty. Gesture. Movement. Body dynamics of the skateboarder. Creations of the skateboarder graphic artist Jim Phillips. The broad gestural brushstrokes of Roy Lichtenstein’s abstract expressionism. Pop art, and its mass culture. The Venezuelan sculptor Jesús Soto’s Penetrables series. All of this arsenal of references have influenced Juarês Matter. His sculpture comes from a process that involved painting, separation, re-assembly. He has developed his very particular technique by seeking and experiment...

Mario Amaral

Guilherme Santos

Inspired by the diversity of the state of Tocantins, Guilherme Santos transforms the Cerrado region of the Brazilian Sertão into art: he sculpts his figurative pieces mainly in buriti, a wood abundant in the biome; and says that the jatobá (a stable and resonant dense wood) and the plant sponge (Luffa aegyptiaca, known to us as loofah) are also fundamental natural elements that enrich his sculptures.

Worsiley Gouveia

Patrícia Costa

Jeriel

While the world watches documentaries about the importance of preserving the Amazon rainforest, far from understanding what it means to live this reality at close quarters, Jeriel, an artist born among the privileges provided by nature in this region, brings us slices and views of this reality, in the form of his “poetry in painting”. The subject is life beside the river, not only portrayed but interpreted in all its plural, cultural and ethnic wealth. In this mainly self-created artistic style, which he calls Tucuju Pop Art, Jeriel grounds his work firmly on the Brazilian-regional quality of his state.

Juliano Volpato

He abandoned sculpture for some time, and graduated in geology from the State University of Campinas, where he also earned a master’s degree in environmental geochemistry. During his years of study, he lived in London, Segovia, Salamanca and Florence – a city which he said was determinant in his decision to return to sculpture. He learned the technique of carving in wood under the orientation of Carlos Calsavara, and today works exclusively as a sculptor.

Glock

Glock's photographic work is wherever he is, and however the situation presents itself. Journalism, social, institutional, sport, travel, he seeks to cover them all with the same interests. His technique is pure photography, the most original possible, without manipulation. Color has always seduced him, in spite of his admiration for black-and-white. His visual work divides into two parts: photography; and image in movement. But, always together. When he went into TV journalism, he became accustomed to reportage, and this contributed...

Mariana Canet

Photographer Mariana Canet is passionate for – and influenced by – Impressionism, and she instinctively transports us to the flower garden in Giverny of the French painter Claude Monet, considered to be the great master of the Impressionists. The photographs in her Reflexos series remit us to, and re-signify with resonant meaning, the collection of oil paintings of waterlilies that were the main focus of Monet’s output in the last 30 years of his life. Mariana, who bases her production essentially on nature, explores the effect produced by light reflected in water...

Dhéia Ferrari

Péricles Mendes

Marcelo Rebelo de Souza

Paulo Kurazumi

Leopoldino de Abreu

The pleasure of transforming a block of stone – from nature, a simple raw material – into a sculptural object is, says Leopoldino de Abreu, a little like redeeming its human essence. This is what motivates him: fascinated by the possibility of imprinting a way forward, an individual language, on a given piece of stone, by sculpting it, he sublimely massages out the shape, organically feeling his way to the final form each stone should have. He starts with draft sketches springing from inspiration and feelings.

Carolina Kroff

Luzia Sento Sé

The love for Luzia's Sento Sé homeland combined with deep research in the Brazilian soil brought her arts to life. From cocoa to everything important to Brazil, she brought the pitanga, amethyst, cocoa and Brazilwood to her paintings. From Salvador, she inherited symbols such as tiles, lace and beads. In addition to artistic compositions, there is a wide variety of graphic design details in Luzia’s artworks. Many elements combined into one piece of art, indeed. But put together they all result in clean, orderly paintings. Graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design, she bets on white spaces that bring some freshness amidst her cheerful gradient tones.

Cristina Cappeline

Fernando Calderari

A disciple of Guido Viaro, Fernando Calderari dared to practice abstract art in a society that was still very conservative and distant from the vanguard of the European countries and the US. His work at that time flowed naturally from the most traditional to the most contemporary abstract expressionism, without causing any shock at all. And indeed, by contrast, he was to be the main force behind the renewal of the plastic arts in Paraná – leading it in the direction of figurative expressionism, replacing a largely academic approach.

Angelita Cardoso

Tercília dos Santos

One Sunday night, when she was 36, a marked episode transformed Tercília dos Santos' life. She had a dream of Jesus, as a child aged 10: he showed her paintings of a wide variety of places and scenery, and when she awoke she was surprised to find she felt as if she already knew how to paint. Tercília's strong brushstrokes take us to essentially figurative countryside scenes, full of characters redeemed from her affective memory. From then on, things happened rapidly for this brazilian naif artist who has won innumerable awards in art salons in Brazil and abroad.

Sonia Gouveia

RSTomczak

Slaking his soul’s anxiety for the perfect vision, the perfect scene. Firmly committed. At whatever cost. Faithful to origins, his cultural influences; impossible to topple him with the temptations of the contemporary: decided in his conviction of choices – both subject and style. Renê Silvio Tomczak is inspired by the great names of painting in the state of Paraná – Alfredo Andersen, Guido Viaro, Theodoro de Bona: impressionism is the basis of his art. These are in loco artists. It is in the same way that Renê chooses his subjects: you will see him, folding easel-case in hand...

Irineo Albiero Filho

Frederico Morbach

Lavalle

The imagination, and memory; vibrantly expressed emotion; symbolism; figuration, with traces of the abstract; mythology; psychology; sexuality: these are all features that mark the work of Luiz Lavalle – and are also intrinsic to neo-expressionism. This movement emerged in Germany in the late 1970s, spreading to Europe and later the USA, aiming to bring back into painting the role of recording and expression of feelings through art, re-igniting features of expressionism, symbolism and Surrealism.

Dulce Osinski

Dulce Osinski deals with a varied range of subjects in contemporary society, from false moralism and today’s consumer society to the hypocrisy of speeches about violence, especially guns – and more recently, themes of the geographical space we inhabit, and its appropriation by digital means. She is interested in gardens – nature as organized by humans. Her motivations are in human beings’ contradictions, expressed in their thinking, attitudes and work.

Evandro Karvat

Evandro Karvat portrays animals of the Brazilian fauna threatened with extinction, such as the Marsh Deer, Golden Lion Tamarin and the Toucan. Entering his universal of animals, we are impressed by the colours – they shriek, and stand out even more than the shapes. They are dragged into our field of vision as bright statements in their own right, and then form the figures. In close-up, the image is a wild abstract. From far away, it is suddenly, sharply, clearly, figurative.

Antonio Peregrino

Paulo Apodonepá

The indigenous artist Paulo Apodonepá is from the “Balotiponé” tribe, part of the “Umutina” people. Located in the municipalities Barra do Bugres and Alto do Paraguai, between rivers Paraguai and Bugres, in Mato Grosso, a large state in Brazil’s Midwest, ...

Lú Franco

David Jose

NEEHO

Nelson Hohmann is inspired by Andy Warhol’s use of silkscreen – he sees it as the most versatile of the techniques of printmaking, providing many resources than only it can achieve. “The use, for example, of photography and computing, printing on multiple surfaces, large formats, reproduction in series – open up infinite perspective for its use,” he says. He works with chance. His researches are into the use of multiple consecutive silkscreen impressions on the base material. Successive layers of multicolored paints, and the filling of all the space...

Bemgi

It was a deep dive into David Hockney’s Californian pools that awakened in our artist Bemgi the desire to seek channels of expression in his painting. Inspired by the geometry and architecture of Hockney’s Los Angeles dwellings, one of the greatest British artists of the last 50 years, he frankly says he uses the components of the universe to give shape to his creations. “Painting elements like water, earth, air and fire provides transformative experiences that lead us, through a thread of freedom, to our most intimate thoughts.” On freedom, he agrees with Francis Bacon...

Maria Cheung

Maria Cheung – Cheung Miu Kuen – was born in Hong Kong, in 1957, and brought up, from infancy, in Brazil. In her art, she revisits her origins in an unceasing quest to recover her roots, her identity, recapture what was left behind. “When I arrived in Brazil at age seven, I had to negate my culture, to be accepted in the new society,” she says. In this quest for herself she explores intense images of customs, traditions and personal memories. Her key material is ceramics – also used with other materials in installations, sometimes of monumental size. They inspire...

Lucas Ksenhuk

André Brik

Artist and illustrator André Brik finds the essential material for his creations in observation of the forms and colors of day-to-day things. Fruit, flowers, toys, similar objects – still life. The result is stylized images in basic geometrical elements, acquiring a new visual meaning. His compositions in bright and contrasting colors have a subtle irony and refined humor, which he attributes to various influences: the theatre of the absurd, British nonsense humor, but above all the humor of the Brazilians, almost the only people, he says, whose sense of humor often involves the liberating attitude of laughing at one’s own fate.

Ana Lecticia Mansur

Marcos de Sertânia

From a family of farmers and artisans, who produced domestic utensils and small sculptures of cattle, Marcos de Sertânia is part of a new generation of masters of Brazilian popular art, who innovate with language and with their own style. Self-taught, and using wood as the basis for his sculptures, he portrays the suffering caused by the droughts, creating gaunt, skeletal figures - dogs -, permeated with drama and melancholy. “I have lived through everything that I put in my work: I have suffered in the droughts, helped my mother to carry water on her head. My father was a cowman: I have seen cattle die of hunger” – he says.

Eduardo Baruch

Marilene Zancchett

“An emptiness that fills space. Sparsely populated by colors – few but welcoming.” Could this minimal(/ist) use of words – simple, but with meaning – be the most coherent way to represent the work of Marilene Zancchett in writing? Minimum – minimal – expression: one of the keys, of course, in expression through art. Restraint. For Marilene, it translates into only minimal occupation of the white spaces on the canvas; abstract, with a raw description of human figures; little emotion in them; only a timid use of secondary colors.

Marcos Marcolla

Brígida Campbell

Mazé Mendes

The geometry of the signs of urbanism transformed Mazé Mendes' paintings into veritable exercises in abstraction, thus establishing a dialogue close to the production of one of her greater influences: the Chinese artist Helena Wong. Her interest in the curves of oriental brushwork and the quest for synthesis in color and in image are now essential features of her painting. Words, oriental ideograms, fragments of indigenous and ethnic objects, graphics and urban impressions are also a constant in her works.

Dhi Ferreira

Dhi Ferreira does not express himself in an intellectual way. Rather, he seeks communication through emotion, unconditioned by cultural, philosophical, or ideological knowledge. The art that comes to life through the painter’s hands reaches a vital expressiveness. "The feminine is, to me, a universe of indecipherable and distant actions and emotions. Mother, lover, friend, partner…a woman is much more than this and far beyond the roles society wants her to play. Through the images, I create imaginary paths made by colors and forms, which help me to penetrate...

Karina Marques

Karina Marque's present output of drawings demonstrates a relationship with line, drawing, prints, and the expanded concept of that language: recording of rapid and precise gestures, in which the total involvement with what is done is perceived while it is done. Several factors enter a dialogue: Japanese calligraphy – Shodo, an oriental writing that does not allow repeating the gesture, because the line itself is meaning; weight and lightness joined with the paper. At some moment the precisely-directed pen gives way to a slow, navigating line that crosses the limits of the paper to...