MARINA PEREZ SIMÃO

Early Years

Marina Perez Simão was born in Vitória, Brazil, in 1981. She studied fine art at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) in São Paulo and later earned a master’s degree in philosophy from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. This dual grounding in visual practice and theory has played a pivotal role in shaping the contemplative depth and formal complexity of her art.

Simão currently lives and works in São Paulo, where she continues to develop her distinctive vocabulary of colour, gesture, and metaphysical inquiry.

Artworks

Blurring the boundaries between memory, emotion, and place, Marina Perez Simão’s artworks explore the intersection of the internal world with expansive landscapes, using abstract painting as a conduit for transcendental experience.

Layers of Experience

Simão’s process is deeply meditative and accumulative, involving the slow layering of oil, gouache, and graphite over time. She works intuitively, allowing forms to surface from memory rather than direct observation. Her early works bear traces of Brazil’s modernist landscape tradition, yet they resist concrete reference. Instead, she draws on feelings, sensations, and fleeting impressions, constructing visual spaces that hover between the familiar and the unknowable. Her practice often begins with sketchbooks filled with abstract studies, which serve as springboards for larger paintings. In this way, her works are vessels of subjective time—geologies of thought and emotion built layer by layer.

Imagined Geographies

Recurring throughout Simão’s art is the theme of invented terrain—places shaped more by the mind’s logic than cartographic rules. Her paintings evoke aerial perspectives, coastlines, mountains, and bodies of water, but these are never literal depictions. In The Day Before Yesterday (2021), undulating planes of dusty rose and sienna suggest topographies half-remembered from dreams. Her canvases often contain competing spatial cues, flattening or deepening the picture plane with sudden chromatic shifts or gestural interventions. This spatial ambiguity contributes to a sense of drifting—an invitation to lose one’s bearings. In Simão’s hands, landscape becomes a metaphor for mental and emotional mapping.

Colour and Intuition

Colour in Simão’s paintings is never merely aesthetic—it is central to the emotional charge and atmospheric weight of her work. Her palette spans from earthy, mineral tones to brilliant bursts of coral, indigo, and lime, often layered in such a way that pigment seems to breathe from beneath the surface. She uses colour not only to evoke mood but to suggest elemental phenomena—sunsets, volcanic ash, clouds at dawn. Each painting is a study in chromatic alchemy, where harmony and dissonance coexist. While her works are abstract, they convey a powerful sense of embodiment and psychological interiority, grounded in intuitive feeling.

Exhibitions

Marina Perez Simão has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• Marina Perez Simão: Diapasão, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2025)
• Marina Perez Simão: ZWIELICHT, G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig (2024)
• Marina Perez Simao: Observatory, Sifang Museum, Nanjing (2021)
• Marina Perez Simão: black birds, Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint Etienne, France (2009)

Group Exhibitions

• Recipes for Broken Hearts, the Bukhara Biennial (2025)
• Horizons, Brazilian paintings, Grand Palais, Paris (2025)
• Alchemists, Pond Society, Shanghai (2024)
• Multiple Sights: The Tenth Anniversary of the Long Museum, Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai (2022)
• Fragile - Lands of Empathy, Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne, France (2009)

Instagram

Marina Perez Simão’s Instagram can be found here.

Critical Reception

Marina Perez Simão’s work has been featured in leading contemporary art publications, including Art Basel, Artnet News, and Hyperallergic.

Marina Perez Simão FAQs

Ocula | 2025