Thalita Hamaoui | Nascer da Terra

509 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

For inquiries, please contact Kelly Woods:

kelly@boeskygallery.com

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Nascer da Terra, the debut U.S. solo exhibition of Brazilian painter Thalita Hamaoui (b. 1981; São Paulo, Brazil). For her first exhibition with the gallery, Hamaoui weaves generational memory and folklore into imagined landscapes teeming with the abundance of tropical nature.

Continually investigating the very nature, history, and materiality of painting, Hamaoui draws on a host of references throughout her practice—from the nuanced interaction of light and color found in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and the rich, saturated hues of East Asian painting traditions to the uniquely Brazilian Tropicália movement of the late 1960s. In her vibrant, richly textured canvases, the artist imagines fantastical, overgrown landscapes that glow with a rich, internal luminosity. Building her work layer upon layer, with particular attention to color and gesture, Hamaoui conjures dense jungles amidst constant transformation—each element of the landscape seemingly poised on the verge of change: growing, blooming, evolving.

Hamaoui, the child of Romanian and Egyptian immigrants, grew up in Brazil, surrounded by the country’s lush, verdant landscapes—from the tropical Amazon to the rugged Serra do Mar. As a child, she was close with her maternal grandmother, who would frequently recount tales of her native Romania—particularly of the infamously haunted Hoia-Baciu Forest. For Hamaoui, who had never been to Romania, the landscape of these stories took on a tropical character as they wove their way into her memory. When Hamaoui began painting, it was her grandmother’s stories—as they lived in her imagination—that she conjured on canvas. These stories, turned over again and again in the artist’s memory, animate the paintings in Nascer da Terra, populated, as they are, with dense, eerie foliage, and twisting, contorted trees. Infused with generational memory, these works nevertheless take on a distinctly Brazilian character, deeply informed by the color, chaos, and abundance of tropical nature.

While the paintings of Nascer da Terra revel in the natural bounty of Hamaoui’s home country—she realizes them not from observation or photograph, but from memory and intuition. Hamaoui’s practice is deeply tied to process: she lines the walls of her studio with canvases, working on an entire suite of paintings simultaneously and allowing them to take form in conversation with one another. Working on both linen and cotton. Hamaoui layers oil paint and oil stick using a host of gestures and techniques to build the rich texture of her surfaces. Emerging slowly, from the depths of the artist’s inner world, the resulting landscapes embody a sense of boundless possibility, of endless reinterpretation.

In their potent embrace of potential, Hamaoui’s paintings echo the conceptual underpinnings of Tropicália, an influential counter-cultural movement that arose under Brazil’s brutally oppressive 21-year military dictatorship. Borrowing its name from a 1967 Hélio Oiticica installation and its conceptual underpinnings from poet Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto Antropófago, Tropicália appropriated European, African, and indigenous influences into a dynamic, uniquely Brazilian cultural movement that interrogated the country’s image as a tropical utopia. While the movement itself was relatively short-lived, its legacy looms large in contemporary Brazilian art, defined, as it has become, as an ongoing process of becoming, a never-ending project of incorporating new influences into a perpetual reimagining of identity.

Nascer da Terra, the exhibition’s title, literally translates as “born of the earth”—or “earthrise.” Teeming with lush botanical life, Hamaoui’s paintings undeniably arise from the natural world, from the context in which she lives. Yet, throughout her careful, painterly process, Hamaoui weaves a host of divergent influences into these images—infusing them with histories both personal and artistic, ultimately transporting us to a dream-like realm on the brink of change, forever poised to become something new.

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. Hamaoui studied Fine Art at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado. She is represented by Simões de Assis and Marianne Boesky Gallery. She lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.