TEFAF Maastricht 2026: Thalita Hamaoui in conversation with Odilon Redon

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Thalita Hamaoui (b. 1981; São Paulo, Brazil) in conversation with Odilon Redon (1840–1916) for TEFAF Maastricht 2026. Featuring a suite of new paintings by Hamaoui—alongside two pastels by Redon—the presentation activates a dialogue on the power of nature, memory, and myth.

Throughout her vibrant, kaleidoscopic canvases, Hamaoui imagines fantastical, overgrown landscapes that glow with a rich, internal luminosity. The child of Romanian and Egyptian immigrants, Hamaoui grew up in Brazil, immersed in the country’s lush, verdant landscapes. Throughout her childhood, the artist absorbed her grandmother’s tales of Romania—of folklore and haunted forests—the landscape of these stories taking on a tropical character as they wove their way into Hamaoui’s memory. When she began painting, it was her grandmother’s stories that she conjured on canvas. These tales—passed down through generations and turned over again and again in the artist’s memory—animate Hamaoui’s visions of tropical nature with an indelible sense of the mythic.  

In the 1890s, Redon—who was then best known for surreal, black-and-white lithographs—began to incorporate color into his palette. An “exquisite and unforgettable painter of flowers,” Redon conjured fantastical bouquets amidst undefined, atmospheric space, mythic and religious narratives in dreamy, floral landscapes, and ships adrift on colorful, uncertain seas. Neither realism nor naturalism were of any particular interest to Redon; rather, he borrowed elements of the natural world, carefully wielded them to capture the dreamlike quality and emotional depth of the particular fantasies for which he became famed. “Instead of choosing between imagination and mimesis, fantasy and nature,” curator Jodi Hauptman writes, “Redon deployed one to get to the other: he closely examined nature in inventing fantasies, he carefully observed reality as a way to take flights of the imagination.” While Redon associated—at various points throughout his career—with the Post-Impressionists, Symbolists, and Nabis, he never truly belonged to any singular movement. His work, instead, remained deeply personal, rooted in memory and imagination; he rendered flowers in loose, easy brushstrokes not to capture the natural world, but to capture fleeting memories and ephemeral sensations. 

Hamaoui, too, deploys elements of the natural world in a visual vocabulary that seeks to articulate deeply personal experience. Layering dense, variegated foliage rendered in paints which themselves derive from local flora, Hamaoui conjures the density of the rainforest and the impenetrability of Brazil’s vast wilderness. Flowers and ferns melt into one another, perpetually on the brink of transformation—an inner landscape nearly bodily in its perpetual state of flux: growing, evolving, breathing, digesting. With rich, textured surfaces and a sense of depth captured in seemingly unending layers, each canvas a portal into this strange, tropical memoryscape. 

The symbolic, too, enters Hamaoui’s oeuvre through nature. A curved crescent form—a painted gesture, more than anything—recurs throughout Hamaoui’s work. Understood, at first as lunar, Hamaoui eventually began to rotate the form, flipping it on its side, turning it upside down. Upon reading Ellis Island, Georges Perec’s moving meditation on immigration and identity, this overturned crescent came to resemble, in Hamaoui’s mind, that of a sailing vessel, conjuring associations with grand journeys and recalling Redon’s mythic seascapes—as well as her parents’ own tales of migration to Brazil. Never explicitly operating as sea-faring vessels, the subtle boat-like forms nevertheless lend the work a sense of the sense of liminality, where—to borrow a phrase from Perec—one may have left, but they have not yet arrived. 

Redon once remarked that his work emerged from “the confluence of two riverbanks, that of representation and that of memory.” It is an apt account, too, of Hamaoui’s work. Reveling in the boundless, fantastical possibilities found at the junction of these dual riverbanks, Redon and Hamaoui draw from their experience of the natural world—but make no qualms about abandoning reality in search of an emotional truth. “This is the unique trail that Redon blazed,” Hauptman writes, “a notion of vision that encompasses both the ability to observe and the capacity to experience the mystical or the supernatural: the combination of the real and the fantastic.” The result, for both Hamaoui and Redon, is a mirage—a moment, a memory, a myth— suspended forever in paint.

ABOUT THALITA HAMAOUI

Hamaoui’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil in 2023, NowHere, Lisbon, Portugal in 2019, and at the Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil in 2017. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions throughout South America, Europe and the United States, including Sublime Spirit, a summer group exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery in 2024. Hamaoui completed the Pivô Artist Residency in São Paulo in 2018. Her work is included in the collection of the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock. Hamaoui studied Fine Art at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado; she lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.