ARTISTS・VENUES

Born in São Paulo in 1987, lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil

Juliana dos Santos is a Brazilian artist whose practice investigates the relationships between color, time, and space. Working across immersive installations, painting, and performance, she employs natural pigments, fabrics, paper, and organic materials, most notably the Clitoria ternatea flower, with which she maintains what she describes as an ongoing collaborative process.
The blue extracted from the Clitoria ternatea flower operates in her work as sensorial, symbolic, and political matter. Rather than treating painting as a fixed image, Juliana dos Santos constructs pictorial fields through actions such as blowing, dispersion, staining, and oxidation, allowing the material itself to participate in the formation of the work. Through these procedures, distinctions between painting, installation, and performance dissolve into a continuous process of making.
The natural oxidation of the vegetal pigment introduces duration into the pictorial surface, allowing the work to continue transforming over time. Her paintings often bring into contact two distinct temporal regimes: the living time of vegetal color, which shifts according to humidity, light, temperature, and oxidation, and the more static time of industrial or mineral pigments, whose chromatic behavior tends toward permanence. Color is therefore not stabilized but experienced as a living process, positioning painting as an unfolding event rather than a concluded object.
Recent presentations include her solo exhibition Temporã at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and her participation in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice (2025). In 2026, she was among the nominees for the K21 Global Art Award. Juliana dos Santos holds a PhD in Arts from the Institute of Arts at Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). In 2018, she was artist-in-residence and lecturer in the Department of Contextual Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria.