For her debut solo exhibition in Japan, Simão—a Brazilian artist renowned for her work in oil painting, watercolor, and printmaking—will unveil a new series of landscape-inspired pieces. Her vibrant, lyrical compositions blur the lines between interior and exterior worlds, guiding viewers through semi-abstract realms filled with organic, flowing forms. Her work reflects a deep engagement with emotion, memory, and place, rendered through a distinctly personal visual language. As part of her process, Simão begins with drawing and watercolor, forging her compositions on canvas after her initial iterations of ideas and forms in these other mediums. Citing Ohtake as a key influence on her practice, she is presenting a solo exhibition at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo through October 19.

The paintings that Simão will show at Pace Tokyo speak to her deep and enduring interest in abstraction’s power to convey ideas, concepts, and feelings that transcend language. With these canvases created in 2024 and 2025, the artist has experimented with vertical and horizontal formats to propose new ways of reading space. Defying conventions of landscape painting, she often incorporates multiple horizons in her otherworldly, atmospheric compositions.

Simão’s new works are chromatically linked by her use of indigo—an ode to the centuries-old tradition of indigo production in Japan—as well as shades of red and pink. Always unfolding her practice in different directions with each body of work, she has also imbued these dynamic paintings, through palette and gesture, with cosmic luminosity and rhythmic motion. Rendered at multiple scales, Simão’s latest compositions are rife with mystery, and they propose new ways of viewing and experiencing landscape.

Together, these exhibitions of work by Simão and Ohtake will present an intergenerational conversation between two artists linked by their heritage and their imaginative approaches to abstraction and landscape painting.