The Artsy Vanguard 2025: Laís Amaral

Amaral has had a meteoric rise in recent years, despite never going to art school and first visiting an art museum, the Museu de Arte do Rio, when she was 24 years old (she’s now in her early thirties). Although artmaking was always a strong presence in her life, the art world always seemed to exist on the periphery. As a child, she watched her relatives produce embroideries, costume jewelry, and other crafts like floral arrangements. But her family’s artistic production “was always considered artisanal crafts, not fine art,” she said. “There’s still that division in Brazilian society—especially when it comes to racialized people.”

Around a decade ago, Amaral chose to study social services at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niterói, and worked as a social worker in Rio de Janeiro until around 2023, focusing on art and education. She formally began her art practice in 2017, when she cofounded the artist collective Trovoa (“Thunder”) in Niterói with Ana Almeida, Ana Clara Tito, and Carla Santana. Each artist came from very different backgrounds, from art to science. “Although I grew up around art, the so-called art world for me started with Trovoa,” Amaral said. “It was definitely destiny.”

When Trovoa was formed, the artists shared a living space and an adjacent studio in Niterói, which had been repurposed from a neighbor’s spare room. In their work, the group sought to reflect on the experiences of women artists in Brazil, addressing themes related to race and gender through paintings, installations, photographs, and public gatherings. This included the “Chá de Verão” (“Summer Tea”) series, which brought together women at various stages in their art careers to discuss non-white artistic production.

“It was a very intense and powerful moment,” Amaral said. “We still felt distanced from the art world, and didn’t have many references of racialized women artists in Brazil. We also recognized that there are many women who face the same problems we did and don’t ever break through.” In some of her earliest experiments with Trovoa, she painted on glass and other surfaces salvaged from the street, although most of these works have been lost.

“I didn’t have any notion that the works could become something back then,” Amaral said. “Considering the beginning of Trovoa, I’ve been an artist for around eight years. But it’s only in the last three that my work has gained commercial weight, which has greatly impacted my practice, since painting requires an excess of materials that were scarce for me before. It means that there’s still much learning and practice and experimentation ahead.”

In recent years, Amaral has primarily focused on acrylic paintings, which she sometimes incises with unconventional materials like hair picks and manicure tools, creating grids and geometric patterns. “I had only a few canvases in the beginning, so when I didn’t like the work I would start over with black acrylic paint,” she said. “In one of those instances, I scraped the wet painting and this form came through.”

Amaral had her first solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói in 2018, with other exhibitions at Anita Schwartz Galeria in Rio de Janeiro in 2020 and M+B in Los Angeles in 2022. Renato Silva, senior partner of Mendes Wood DM, was a longtime follower of her work and featured Amaral in a group exhibition entitled “Possible Agreements” in Brussels in 2022, where it was well received. The next year, the gallery held Amaral’s first solo exhibition in Europe, “Estude fundo,” in the same space.

As she began exhibiting her work, Amaral found that criticism of her work was never overly negative, but that it sometimes missed the mark. “I was compared to European abstractionists, or some would say it reminded them of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. But that wasn’t present in the work,” she said. “When the critique was for a male artist, it would usually involve more theory. Artists need spaces where we can experiment without judgment, and where the work can be free from misguided interpretations. That embryonic phase of an artist’s career is very important.”

In preparation for “What Happens at the Seaside at Dawn?,” her first solo exhibition in New York at Mendes Wood DM, which opened in early September, the artist spent the first half of the year living and working in the city. From a loft in Long Island City, she produced a series of enigmatic paintings that reflect on what she describes as the “desertification of nature—a colonial value where we remove ourselves from nature and start to become something artificial as well.”

Works like O sol na altura dos olhos (“The sun at eye level,” 2024) reflect on the dissonance of urbanization, a recurring thread in her work that gained renewed pertinence as she experienced the gridlock of New York City. “I started observing the city in relation to the sun, and in relation to how the light spreads across it. The sunset is always eye-level here,” she said. “The presence of the grid reaffirms that we are animals who have been urbanized. Most of the exhibition shows a dissolution of that idea.”

Most of the new paintings are subtly imbued with personal references. Untitled IV from the series “Como um zumbido estrelar, um pássaro no fundo do ouvido” (2024) honors her late father, with gold lines that represent the Candomblé deity Ubaloaê, the orixá related to illness and death, and subsequently rebirth, who is commonly represented wearing straw coverings. Other works aim to uplift other influential Black women, like Para Rihanna (“For Rihanna,” 2024)—still through a form of pure abstraction.

“As a racialized woman, I recognize the importance of conquering a space of visual freedom, because there is an expectation to work only with certain themes, or to work only in participatory or more feminine curatorial practices,” Amaral said. “It’s almost like I can’t help but be an activist, even when I’m only talking about color and form.”