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Alice Quaresma
Like nothing else in the universe, Brooklyn based Brazilian artist Alice Quaresma pushes the boundaries of photography and painting by combining the two to manipulate the limits of time and memory. With playful strokes and splashes of vivid or pastel paint, tape and pencil, Alice reworks photographs, from an archival state — into a more vulnerable, direct and subjective state. It’s about looking for a sense of place and trying to go beyond the limits of the photo paper.
Camera Distorts the Angle, 2021
60w x 40h cm
Photograph printed on cotton paper with acrylic paint and digital color marks
Ships from New York City
£ 1,600.00
View
‘OVER THE PAST 12 YEARS, I HAVE BROUGHT INTO MY PHOTOGRAPHS THE PRESENCE OF PAINT MARKS, PENCILS, AND OTHER MATERIAL LIKE PAPER CUT-OUTS, SEEKING TO DISRUPT THE FOCUS ON THE IMAGES FROM THEIR DESCRIPTIVE QUALITIES INTO EMOTIONAL AND SUBJECTIVE READINGS.’
Alice was born in Rio De Janeiro, and at the age of 18 back in 2003, she moved to London for her BFA at Central Saint Martins where she majored in painting. ‘Painting was a struggle,’ she says, but was a passion. Developing the practice separately, photography on the other hand, was an escape and comfort zone.
Emphasize The Presence Of The Figure, 2021
35w x 50h cm
Photograph printed on cotton paper with gouache paint, pencil and sticker
Ships from New York City
£ 1,350.00
ViewWhen she finished her BFA and moved to New York to study at the Pratt Institute, she started to fully focus on photography. Graduating in 2009 in the middle of the Financial Crisis meant a shortage of jobs and opportunities. Getting paid for work was suddenly not a given anymore and lots of positions were wiped out. But powering through all the obstacles of a changing art world, Alice kept on re-evaluating and deconstructing her practice.
‘THINGS WILL ALWAYS CHANGE. IT’S ALL GOING TO CHANGE. WHATEVER MY GOAL WAS BACK THEN IS NOT THE GOAL NOW, I WANT OTHER THINGS AND THAT’S OKAY’
For the Radical, 2021
40w x 60h cm
Photograph printed on cotton paper with acrylic paint, pencil and digital color marks
Ships from New York City
£ 1,600.00
ViewYears after putting painting on the back burner, Alice did a painting residency at SVA. During this time she started to deconstruct her photography practice. She began to imbue the approach of a painter, into photography, —making her greet the frame of her photographs, with a state of vulnerability like she would a blank canvas when she’s painting.
‘AS A PAINTER I START FROM A BLANK CANVAS, I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT I’M GOING TO DO AND HOW IT’S COMING THROUGH. WITH PHOTOGRAPHY HOWEVER, EVERYTHING IS MORE ORGANISED’
Inception, 2021
35w x 50h cm
Photograph printed on cotton paper with gouache paint and sticker
Ships from New York City
£ 1,350.00
ViewThe objective is to bring more subjectivity to photography. In a way, she cuts out the camera and creates a more immediate relationship between the artwork and the viewer. Alice relied fully on her archival pictures of her original hometown of Rio de Janeiro, along with other personal photographs of places from the past, where the moment of that time was captured solely and fully through her feelings; instead of the usual organisation of photographic practices. By painting directly on the photograph, she makes a personal snapshot of a memory even more subjective and invites the viewer to experience this moment in time.
Realism as a mode of representation, 2021
45w x 30h cm
Photograph printed on cotton paper with acrylic paint and digital color marks
Ships from New York City
£ 1,200.00
ViewPioneer Neoconcrete Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, along with intersections between photography, identity and the impacts of being an immigrant is an imminent exploration within Alice’s work. With her practice, Alice explores how to close the physical and emotional gap carved in by time, distance, and space between herself, and her roots and her family. These intricate memory of moments are expanded further in their subjectivity with Alice’s distinct stylistic choice of painting over these archival photographs. The shapes, forms, colours and lines embedded into the archival photograph not only resurrects and complements ‘what was’, but opened up ‘what could be’. A new universe of feelings and understanding often unravels with the deconstruction and reconstruction of these archives with each overlay, strokes, and splashes of paint.
terms of representation, 2021
40w x 60h cm
Photograph printed on cotton paper with gouache paint, pencil and sticker
Ships from New York City
£ 1,350.00
ViewAlice has received the Aperture Foundation Summer Open Prize (2019) and Houston Center for Photography Annual Exhibition Prize (2019), Caixa Cultural São Paulo Open Call (2018), Foam Talent Prize (2014) and PS122 Exhibition Prize (2009). On top of that, she also has special projects as part of her studio practice, with Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hermès, GU (Uniqlo sister company), Animale, Air France, Red Bull, Samsung, Première Vision, Unseen and Music from Memory— bringing her to her latest collaboration with the fashion house, Dior.
