Patricia Leite

January 2020

Leite has created a new series of works inspired by the natural world and her own psychological realms. Honouring her country’s complex identity, Leite has chosen the subject of Rio de Janeiro for these paintings, stating that “Rio sums up all the good and bad that my country lives with at this moment”.

The artist bases her work on the intense colours and light of her native country. Working at the boundary between abstraction and representation, Leite describes her artworks as ‘imagined landscapes’, blending memory, association and imagination to subvert traditional landscape painting and encourage new ways of exploring pictorial space.

Leite (b. 1955) lives and works in Belo Horizonte and travels regularly around her home country, absorbing the varied landscapes that influence and inform her work. Her paintings are often devoid of figures, depicting instead the rural scenes she first captures with her iPhone, which are then filtered through her imagination. These settings are brought into painterly life through abstracted shapes and fragmented vistas in hyper-saturated, hallucinatory colours, creating a specific mood and atmosphere within each image.

Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Mendes Wood DM, New York and Brussels and the Manoel Macedo Galeria de Arte, Belo Horizonte. Leite’s work has also been included in numerous institutional group exhibitions including at Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, and resides in numerous international collections including the Pinault Collection and Fiorucci Art Trust.

The exhibition is curated by Amelie von Wedel and Pernilla Holmes from Wedel Art. Patricia Leite is represented by Mendes Wood DM New York, Brussels and São Paulo.

All artworks Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM New York, Brussels and São Paulo