MUCKI BOTKAY

Mucki Botkay translates the language of painting into meticulously embroidered fields of hand-coloured glass beads. Her optically complex compositions are built on the strong and secure foundation of a self-developed colour palette and subtle variations in bead size, shape, orientation and density, causing the image to oscillate between a unified whole and thousands of individual points of light.

Dense tangles of mangrove roots and spare still lives shimmer with light and rhythm, their surfaces animated by the accumulation of individual gleaming beads. Botkay’s tapestries expand the possibilities of painting inherited from Modernism by bringing concerns with colour, surface, and abstraction into dialogue with the material traditions of craft practices including tapestry, mosaic, and embroidery.

Drawing inspiration from the coastal landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, as well as the ecosystems of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, Botkay translates organic forms into immersive fields of colour. Her imagery of gardens, forests, flowers, vines, waves, and bottles gradually dissolve into rhythmic stippled networks and particles that shift between representation and abstraction as one approaches their intricate surfaces.

Trained in decorative arts at the École Supériure des Ensembliers in Geneva in the late 1970s, Botkay arrived at her current practice through decades of experimentation in textile design, fashion, fabric printing, and embroidery. The works she produces today are developed in collaboration with a network of skilled local embroiderers, her works reflect both a deep connection to place and a sustained commitment to supporting artistic communities in Brazil.

The labour-intensive process of beaded embroidery reinforces themes embodied in the work itself. Each bead accumulates into large structures forming canopies, root systems, tree rings, each registering the passage of time. Growth, repetition, and duration are subject matter and part of the process of expanding paintings’ language of texture, movement, and materiality.

Mucki Botkay was born in 1958 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She had her first solo exhibition in 2025 with Galeria Galatea in Salvador, Brazil. Anat Ebgi debuted Botkay’s work in the United States earlier this year at Frieze Los Angeles. Botkay lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.