Marcela Cantuária

Brazilian artist, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Her paintings interweave historical images from the world of politics with representations of contemporary visual culture. Part of her pictorial inventions come from her research into the struggles waged by women around the world. Cantuária creates narratives of confrontation with a society structured on sexism and misogyny, thus creating a plastic-formal vocabulary whose particularities are consistent with her creative process, her colour palette and the articulations that emerge from the open and latent layers of her paints. Taking up social facts that have been repeatedly erased by history, her body of work seeks to dialogue with questions about women's political protagonism, the class struggle, the division of power, gender stereotypes and disputes over political meanings. On Marcela's canvases, film frames, media and journalistic images, figurative miscellanies of the unconscious and photographic records of everyday life make up the bodies of women, military personnel, burning landscapes, domestic animals and wild beasts. These images are integrated in crossed and anachronistic planes, similar to the system of rotating images typical of virtual communication networks, reflecting how our minds process this information.

Marcela Cantuária has a bachelor's degree in painting from the UFRJ School of Fine Arts. In 2024, she opened the solo exhibition "Transmutation: alchemy and resistance", at Paço Imperial, in Rio de Janeiro. In 2023 he had "O Sonho Sulamericano", a solo show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and "Bestiário", his first solo show in Portugal. In the same year, she also took part in the exhibition "Ocultas Marés: Ana Silva & Marcela Cantuária", at A Gentil Carioca São Paulo. She also took part in the L'AiR Arts residency in France and the Bordallo Pinheiro residency in Portugal. In 2022, she presented the solo shows "Propostas de reencantamento" at SESC Pompeia in São Paulo and "invocación del pasado a la velocidad del ahora" at CentroCentro in Madrid. She also took part in the Fountainhead residency in Miami. In 2021, she presented "Esperança Equilibrista" at Caixa de Pandora, São Paulo, and in 2020, "Figurar o impossível" at Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte. In 2019 she presented the solo show "La Larga Noche de los 500 años" at the A Gentil Carioca gallery, the same year he held the solo show "Suturar, Libertar" at the Hélio Oiticica Municipal Art Centre. She also took part in the group shows "Histórias Feministas" at MASP in São Paulo and "Estratégias do Feminino" at Farol Santander in Porto Alegre. Her work is included in the collections of the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), the Museu da Maré, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.