Maria Capelo (b. 1970, Lisbon, Portugal) is introduced, for the first time, at Galeria Nuno Centeno. The MAIO NESTE INVERNO exhibition is a new series of oil on canvas paintings, created between 2022 and 2023.

If the feeling of distant familiarity had a visual representation, Maria Capelo would be one of it’s intermediaries.
Continuing her work centered on the theme of the landscape, these paintings are based on concrete locations, places that seem a little rough, disordered. Trees, mountains, pathways, skies and bodies of water, diffused between shades of vine blacks, ochres, greens, blues and cobalt violets – where foci of light and shadow dance among themselves.
Maria Capelo always departs from direct observation, but only in her atelier, through a process of recomposing and organising the various elements, does the final panorama show itself. As she mentions,

It’s a vocabulary that’s organized, reorganized, disappearing or reappearing, changing scale, position and light. All the relationships between these elements vary in the various paintings in a process that draws on memory and reality.

– Maria Capelo

Her curved brushstrokes and “smudged” sfumato trans- port the viewer through time, across a materialization of “frozen spaces”, ephemeral and fleeting – arboreal sites, embraced by silence, though always with traces of human passage. Simultaneously, the various literary and cinematographic references, which absorb Capelo, lead her to these locations, allowing her to evoke a long tradition of universal landscapes.
The archive of Humanity’s experience is made up of images like the ones we see in MAIO NESTE INVERNO, where we are offered an opportunity, both conceptually and sensorially, to travel between them. Maria Capelo was born in 1970 in Lisbon, where she lives and works. She has exhibited frequently since 1996 and includes amongst her recent solo shows Vem a chuva e vem o vento (CAV – Encontros de Fotografia, Coimbra); O dia já fecha as portas (MAAT- Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia. Edifício da Central, Lisboa); Vento Espesso (Museu da Cidade, Casa Guerra Junqueiro, Porto, 2022); Do Planalto se dobra a montanha (Museu da Cidade, Palacete Viscondes de Balsemão, Porto e Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisboa, 2022); As coisas do mundo são rocha (Pavilhão Branco, Lisboa, 2019); Deita-te, levanta-te e agora deita-te (Fundação Carmona e Costa, Lisboa, 2017). Prominent recent joint exhibitions include Tudo o que eu quero – Artistas portuguesas de 1900 a 2020 (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian e CCOD, Lisboa e Tours, 2021/22); Taking Root (KIT- Kunst im Tunnel, Düsseldorf, 2019); Pedro Costa: Companhia (Fundação de Serralves, Porto, 2018); RE: Imagining Europe (BOX Freiraum, Berlin, 2017).
She won the Flad Drawing Award 2022 and her works are featured in various public and private collections, most notably the Centro de Arte Moderna, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa; Colecção de Arte Contemporânea do Estado, Portugal; Colecção de Arte Portuguesa Fundação EDP; Colecção Norlinda e José Lima, Centro de Arte Oliva, São João da Madeira, and Fundação Carmona e Costa, Lisboa.