Palo Gallery (New York) is pleased to present 'Tropical Still Life', an exhibition of new works by Brazilian artist Manoela Medeiros, marking her first solo exhibition in the United States in collaboration between Palo Gallery and Nara Roesler. Bringing together four of her mixed media paintings and signature wall excavations, the show foregrounds Medeiros’s distinctive approach to art making through processes of excavation, erosion, and subtraction.
In her richly stratified paintings, Medeiros builds layers of acrylic paste, mineral pigment, and paint, only to carve back into the surface with knives, drills, and industrial tools. Through intense mark-making, she exposes fissures of color and texture that evoke the vitality of organic life—burgeoning flora, seed pods splitting open—while shifting between figuration and abstraction.
Her wall excavations extend her painting methodology into architecture. By cutting geometric sections from walls and casting their negative forms, Medeiros transforms clean surfaces into site-specific installations that respond to time and light. In the process, she uncovers hidden strata of pigment, plaster, and paint—hues that cannot be purchased or mixed, but emerge only through the slow work of time, decay, and erosion. These timeworn palettes lend the works an archaeological quality, as if history itself were reanimated through excavation. Walls, like canvases, become repositories of time: layered, weathered, and carrying the memory of what has been built, erased, and rebuilt.
Together, the works in Tropical Still Life position painting and architecture as living bodies that preserve traces of the past, situating Medeiros’s practice at the threshold between construction and destruction, memory and renewal.
Please join Palo Gallery and the artist for a celebratory opening reception on Friday, September 5 from 6-8PM at 21 East 3rd Street in New York City.