Ana Santos

Ana Santos (Espinho, 1982) lives and works in Lisbon. She graduated in Visual Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Porto and she obtained a Masters in Contemporary Culture and New Technologies from the Nova University of Lisbon. She has also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe (Germany) and has been an artist-in-residence at the ISCP in New York. In 2014 she won the portuguese EDP Prize. Among her individual institutional exhibitions we highlight Colecção primavera-verão, Culturgest, Lisbon, 2023; Itinerarios XXVII, Centro Botín, Santander; verão, CentroCentro, Madrid, 2021; Anatema, MAAT, Lisbon,2019; Thabalho, Chiado 8 – Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, 2010. Her work is present in collections such as EDP, Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Serralves Collection where she exhibited in 2018 and 2016, as well as in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris. She has been recipient of the Fundación Botín Visual Arts Grant 2019-2020.

Her practice, essentially, tries to look at the way objects are produced and their articulation with the exhibition space within an extended field of drawing. And, in that sense, through the understanding of the mechanisms of relational functioning between thought and action/thinking and doing, Santos tries to find points of connection that allow me to develop a poetic exercise on the construction of a precise practical structure, where thought an action are articulated. The result is a free and personal interpretation of the production of objects and their relation with space The frontiers between drawing, object and painting dissolve in order to originate a varied and economic production that searches to find diverse formal solutions for a continuous exercise; pragmatic and quick in the imprint of the gesture and concept withheld in that same gesture as a transformative action.