With a multifaceted artistic practice, Miguel Rio Branco develops his work primarily through photography, cinema and installations. Since the 1980s, he has been internationally recognized for the chromatic contrasts that define his production and bring to light essential questions of the human condition — sensuality, pleasure, violence, decay and death. By blurring contours, creating mirroring effects and exploring textures, his poetics are built as a kind of collage and living archive of captured impressions. Polyptychs, recurrent in his practice, function as exercises on the possibilities of shaping images in the pursuit of endless narratives.

It was from 1983 onwards, with his participation in the São Paulo Biennial with the installation “Diálogos com Amaú”, that his path turned toward an increasingly less descriptive use of photography, leading him to dedicate himself exclusively to personal projects in which the photographic image merges with the experience of painting and cinema. Since 1980, he has been a correspondent photographer for the Magnum agency.

Among his most significant solo exhibitions are the panoramic show “Palavras cruzadas, sonhadas, rasgadas, roubadas, usadas, sangradas”, held at Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo (2021), IMS Rio de Janeiro (2022) and Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre (2023); “De Tokyo Blues hacia Gritos Sordos”, Centro Niemeyer, Arévalo, Spain (2024); “Photographies 1968–1992”, Le Bal, Paris (2020); “Nada levarei quando morrer”, MASP, São Paulo (2017); and “Teoria da Cor”, Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2014). Instituto Inhotim, in Brumadinho, has maintained a pavilion dedicated to his work since 2010.

Among group exhibitions, highlights include “Four Photographers, Four Places”, MoMA, New York (2019); 33rd São Paulo Biennial (2018); “Troposphere”, Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing (2017); “Os Muitos e o Um”, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2016); and “América Latina 1963–2013”, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris (2013).

His work has been published in leading national and international magazines, including Stern, Aperture, Photo Magazine, Europeo, Paseante and National Geographic.

His works are held in collections at prestigious institutions worldwide, among them MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum in New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands; the Museum of Photographic Arts of San Diego; MAM Rio de Janeiro; MAM São Paulo; and MASP.