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Ana Maria Tavares (Belo Horizonte, 1958) lives and works in São Paulo. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from FAAP (1982), a Master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1986) and a Doctorate from the University of São Paulo (2000). She has been dedicated to teaching at university level since 1982, having served at the School of Communications and Arts at USP between 1993 and 2017, where she continues to collaborate in the Postgraduate Program.

In her practice, the understanding that tropical nature and architecture are ideological constructions at the center of the triad modernism–modernity–modernization leads to the conceptualization of works that question the political, economic and social implications of the modern movement in Brazil. Her works confront industrial with artisanal techniques, incorporating ornament — an element eliminated from modern architecture — to interrogate questions of gender, race and alterity. Since the 1990s, tropical nature has become the central axis of her investigations, represented through rereadings of works by Burle Marx, the Victoria Amazonica water lilies and Brazilian river basins, in dialogue with the thinking of modernist architects such as Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi.

Throughout her career, she has received significant recognition, including a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, New York (2001); an invitation from the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2005); a nomination for the Ida Ely Rubin Artist-in-Residence at MIT (2007); and the Lynette S. Autrey Visiting Scholars award from the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, Houston (2013). In 2016, she received the APCA award for Best Retrospective for the exhibition “No Lugar Mesmo: uma Antologia da obra de Ana Maria Tavares” at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

Her first solo exhibition, “Objetos e Interferências”, was held at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 1982. Among her most significant solo shows are “Porto Pampulha” (1997) at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha; “Relax’o’vision” (1998) at MuBE; “Enigmas de uma Noite” (2004) at Instituto Tomie Ohtake; “Tautorama” (2013) at Paço das Artes; “Atlântica Moderna: Purus e Negros” (2014) at Museu Vale; “Cárceres a Duas Vozes: Piranesi e Ana Maria Tavares” (2015) at Museu Lasar Segall, São Paulo; “Forgotten Mantras” (2016), “O Real Intocável” (2019) and “Naturalítica e Hierbabuenas” (2023) at Galeria Silvia Cintra, Rio de Janeiro; “Campo Fraturado, SOS” (2021) at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; and “Sortir du Silence: Au-delà de la modernité” (2023) at Galleria Continua, Paris.

She participated in four editions of the São Paulo International Biennial (1983, 1987, 1991 and 2000), the VII Havana Biennial (2000), the Istanbul Biennial (2001) and the Singapore Biennial (2006). Among international group exhibitions, highlights include “Modernité, Art Bresiliènne du XX Siècle” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1987); “Ultramodern: The Art of Contemporary Brazil” at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, USA (1993); “Living Inside the Grid” at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2003); “Farsites: Urban Crisis and Domestic Symptoms in Recent Contemporary Art” at the San Diego Museum of Art (2005); “Grandeur: Sonsbeek_10”, Netherlands (2008); “When Lives Become Form: Creative Power from Brazil” at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2009); “Neo-Tropicália” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, USA (2009); “Spots, Dots, Pips, Tiles: An Exhibition About Dominoes” at the Perez Museum, Miami (2017); “A Máquina do Mundo” at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2021); “Contemporary Art & Sculpture Park at Bechyne Castle”, Czech Republic (2023); “Cloudwalker” at Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands (2024); and “Du Pixel à La Matière” at Pont du Gard, France (2024).

Her works are held in public collections in Brazil and abroad, including the Kröller Müller Museum and Voorlinden Museum in the Netherlands; FRAC-Haute Normandie in France; Fundação de Serralves and Culturgest in Portugal; Fundação Arco in Spain; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen in Belgium; the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da USP; the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói; the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; the Museu de Arte de Brasília; the Museu de Arte da Pampulha; and SESC Belenzinho.