Ana Prata

Ana Prata (Sete Lagoas, BR, 1980) developed her career in São Paulo, where the 1980s painting scene had been predominantly dominated by male painters who favoured a neo-expressionist, transavantgarde style. After a hiatus in the 1990s, when conceptual art took over the circuit, Prata’s was the first generation to fully embrace painting and bring it to the forefront in the new millennium - among her peers are renowned artists like Lucas Arruda, Marina Rheingantz, and others. In her work, the artist freely borrows a myriad of disparate references from art historical genres and movements, combining genuine reverence for the masters of the past with a tongue-in-cheek approach that gives rise, above all, to an ongoing inquiry about the nature and the possibilities of painting in the present. Over the past couple of years, Prata has been consistently exploring the still life genre, embracing a wide vocabulary of pictorial references ranging from naif art, abstraction, amateur Sunday painting, and many more, thus conflating binary categories such as high and low/erudite and outsider/ major and minor in works characterised by their exceptional use of colour and composition.