Arthur Palhano b. 1996

Arthur Palhano (1996, Rio de Janeiro) is a visual artist who attended the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in 2019. He lives and works in São Paulo. His practice centers on painting, developed through the layering, scraping, and excavation of paint—a process that reveals the historicity of surfaces and activates the memory inscribed in the objects and images represented.

Palhano draws from memory, images, and everyday objects—such as knives, shoes, and small domestic icons—that, when transposed into painting, acquire symbolic density. In his works, these elements carry familial and affective memories while also engaging with traditional categories of painting, such as the dialogue between figure and ground and the still-life genre, in order to challenge and reframe them.

The depth of his images does not emerge from perspectival illusion but rather from the dense layers of oil he applies and scrapes away, turning painting into a kind of archaeological experience and a testimony of memory.

Among his exhibitions, highlights include: Pequenas pinturas III (Group show, Auroras, São Paulo, 2025); Partial Objects (duo with Kian Mckeown, MAMA Projects, New York, USA, 2024); Do desenho (Group show, Centro Cultural dos Correios, Rio de Janeiro, 2024); Dogma (Solo show, Portas Vilaseca, Rio de Janeiro, 2023); MUAMBA: Brazilian Traces of Movement (Group show, Ruby Cruel, London, UK, 2023). He has been an artist-in-residence at Casa Fugaz (Peru, 2022) and Oásis (Rio de Janeiro, 2021).