FRIEZE LONDON 2026

Known for her work across painting, watercolor, installation, and drawing, Perez Simão merges interior and exterior landscapes in abstract, undulating compositions alive with movement, color, and light. In her paintings for Frieze London, she activates subtle shifts in tone to create works that change with the viewer’s movement and perspective, at times revealing unexpected variations in hue and temperature. Though they are more focused in chromatic scope than her previous works, as Perez Simão describes, “they are not really monochromes. Instead, I worked with families of blues, grays, and pinks so that each painting behaves as though it contains a full palette.”

Pace’s presentation will extend beyond the conventions of the traditional art fair booth, conceived instead as an immersive installation within a bespoke architectural environment. Creating a sense of contemplation around the works, the installation invites visitors into a quiet, intimate encounter with the paintings, which Perez Simão describes as each containing its own complete environment.

“The color groups have very different energies, both compositionally and atmospherically, each governed by its own particular conditions,” Perez Simão says. Across the three groups, she is interested in what she calls “the alchemy” of color and its capacity to transform in relation to what surrounds it, informed by her research into color theory. Perez Simão found inspiration for this body of work in NASA’s discovery of the pink planet GJ 504 b, a gas giant several times the mass of Jupiter and shrouded in salt clouds. In her words, her new paintings become “vague descriptions of strange worlds.”

Engaging a range of tints, the magenta paintings move away from the bubblegum pinks of popular culture toward pigments found in nature. Encompassing ultramarine, turquoise, Manganese blue, and more, the blue works explore how neighboring colors can radically shift the perception of a hue. The grey paintings combine these approaches, incorporating subtle variations of yellow and ochre. Through these chromatic investigations, Perez Simão expands her exploration of perception, demonstrating how color can generate space, atmosphere, and emotional resonance.