Marcela Florido

(BrAZILIAN, b. 1988)

For Marcela, "art has been a way to re-contextualize the past, and painting has the potential to open new territories". She paints both to establish some kind of sufficient language for expressing her own thoughts, but also to develop a new and more appropriate vocabulary - one able to re-narrate the intimacy of different bodies and experiences.

She is influenced by personal memories, books, mass media, personal archives, and images of seascapes and architecture in particular. All these accumulate and each layer becomes the trace of a larger narrative. These images also question notions of presence, of how a person can inhabit such spaces. In her paintings the figures are most prominently females and are often caught in a moment when their bodies and selves are overwhelmed by the context in which they exist.

Marcela was born in Rio de Janeiro and in 2008 attended the Slade School of Art, University of London. She then completed an MFA at Yale University in 2015. She lives and works between New York and Rio.

"I do want more females to come into the paintings. What I felt as an over-concern with the body is something that is so present in my life in Brazil. It is a narrative that I grew up in and that literally shapes the bodies of females around me. It is interesting but it is also scary." - M. Flórido