Ana Cardoso

Ana Cardoso (Lisbon, 1978) lives and works between Lisbon and New York. Her multifaceted painting practice employs an array of medium-specific approaches: from abstraction to formlessness, materiality to illusion, conceptualism to the ready-made. She explores painting’s elastic content in relation to its context, its production in relation to its presentation; and pivots between the viewer and the history of painting. For her, throughout history but also in this digital age, the viewer activates and performs the painting, its flatness and its depths. She works with predefined structures – modular canvases that fit comfortably the length of her open arms, triangles, squares, parallelograms, rectangles – that mutate into dynamic new compositions which are then again reshuffled, recombined, performed, stacked, or moved through a vast landscape of fragments. Cardoso’s paintings reveal different dimensions throughout the diverse moments of their production and distribution process. Optical folds are suggested when the works are installed; her configurations play with recto-verso concepts and three-dimensionality; her folded strips present recto and verso simultaneously and become performances that integrate the broader site of painting. Within Ana Cardoso’s inclusive painting corpus, Neo-Concretism and Formalism stand out as open source alphabets that the body inhabits to reformulate former logics and parameters, using structure and the monochrome as vessels for romantic experimentation, site of accidents, questioning, contamination, encounters, and a continuous array of self-reflexive and mediated gestures.

Ana Cardoso received her MA in Fine Art from the Hunter College, New York, in 2006. She has had solo or duo exhibitions at Nuno Centeno, Porto (2019); Parapet Real Humans, St Louis (2018); Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva Museum, Lisbon (2018); Temnikova & Kasela, Tallin (2017); Jablonka Maruani Mercier, Knokke (2016); Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2015); MNAC – Contemporary Art Museum, Lisbon (2015); Múrias Centeno, Lisbon (2014); Longhouse Projects, New York (2014); Maisterravalbuena, Madrid (2012); Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2012); Soloway, New York (2011); Conduits, Milan (2011); and Southfirst, New York (2008); among others. Cardoso was included in group exhibitions at Galerias Municipais – Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon (2022); Cristina Guerra, Lisbon (2021); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2020); Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2018–19); MAAT Museum, Lisbon (2017); Rachel Uffner, New York (2015); Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, Cluj (2012); Prague Biennial 5 (2011); Tate St Ives (2011); The Kitchen, New York (2009); White Flag Projects, Saint Louis (2008); and Culturgest, Lisbon (2007). Her work has been featured in Artforum, Flash Art, Mousse, Modern Painters, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Contemporânea and included in the book Painting Now edited by Suzanne Hudson and published by Thames & Hudson (London) in 2015. She has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2019–20) and was a fellow of Shandaken: Projects, Paint School master class, New York (2018–19).