manoela medeiros

In her practice, Manoela Medeiros (b. 1991, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) articulates an approach to painting that transcends the specificities of the medium, making use of sculpture, performance, and installation work. Pursuing a hybrid framework for the pictorial, Medeiros questions artistic media by going beyond their conventional formats, producing paintings and in situ installations that explore the relationships between space, time, and the corporeality of art and of the viewer.

The artist frequently performs direct interventions into exhibition spaces, creating works that emerge from the singularities of the space around her, whether they be material, structural, or in relation to natural and artificial light. With this, her practice attributes a sense of organicity to space, turning architecture into its own body, one that is specific to the experience of art.

Through a seemingly archeological process, Medeiros engages with the notion of ruins as a spatial indication for passing time, undertaking a process that reveals what is often left to underlie. The artist scrapes surfaces - such as the exhibition space's walls-, unveiling the layers of colors and materials employed, covered, and thus, forgotten over time. Medeiros seeks to reinvigorate our temporal experience by exhibiting layers -each of which carries the memory of the time when it was created-, and by allowing them to coexist and intertwine. Thus, the artist operates within a liminal space between construction and destruction, foregrounding how they may complement, rather than detract from each other. 

Manoela Medeiros lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Medeiros studied at the École Des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, and at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, in Rio de Janeiro. Solo exhibitions include: O carnaval da substância, at Nara Roesler (2022), in São Paulo, Brazil; Concerto a céu aberto, at Kubik Gallery (2020), in Porto, Portugal; L'être dissout dans le monde, at Galerie Chloé Salgado (2019), in Paris, France; Poeira varrida, at Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel (2017), in São Paulo, Brazil; and Falling Walls, at Double V Gallery (2017), in Marseille, France. Group exhibitions include: Arqueologias no presente, at Nara Roesler (2021), in São Paulo, Brazil; Recyclage / Surcyclage, at Fondation Villa Datris (2020), in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France; Reservoir, at 019 (2020), in Ghent, Belgium; Vivemos na melhor cidade da América do Sul, at Fundação Iberê Camargo (FIC) (2018), in Porto Alegre, Brazil;  Espaces témoins, at Praz Delavallade (2018), in Paris, France; 67ème Prix Jeune Création, at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (2017), in Paris, France; 62ème Salon Montrouge (2017), in Paris, France; In Between, at Galeria Bergamin & Gomide (2016), in São Paulo, Brazil; 11º  Abre Alas, at Gentil Carioca, (2015), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; among others.