SEOUL.- White Cube Seoul is presenting a new body of work by Brazilian artist Marina Rheingantz, whose paintings transform memories, photographs and impressions of the Brazilian landscape into shifting, elusive terrains that resist any fixed sense of place.
Rather than depicting specific locations, Rheingantz builds her landscapes from an evolving personal archive that includes photographs, textile references, painterly influences and memories of growing up in rural Araraquara, Brazil. Her works often appear caught between recognition and abstraction, as if the image is constantly coming into view and disappearing again.
That sense of instability is central to Mope (2026), the painting that gives the exhibition its title. The Portuguese word means “nearsighted,” an apt description for Rheingantz’s broader approach to landscape. Across the canvas, botanical fragments appear in mauve, lavender and ochre, rendered through delicate, point-like marks. Some areas seem sharply focused while others dissolve into haze, creating an effect that can resemble double or even triple vision.
The artist achieves these surfaces through a process of both adding and removing paint. Pigment accumulates, thins, stains and runs, producing canvases that can resemble terrain in their own right. Rheingantz frequently uses turpentine to dilute oil paint, allowing color to bleed across the surface and introducing an element of unpredictability into the work.
In Pipa (2026), the largest painting in the exhibition, a cloud-like form hovers against a pale pink field. At first, the composition appears almost airborne, but scattered marks gradually suggest fronds, seedheads, stems and flowers. The viewer is pulled back toward the ground, even as the painting refuses to establish a stable horizon or perspective.
That uncertainty recurs throughout the exhibition. Rheingantz rarely allows the eye to settle into conventional foreground, middle ground and distance. Instead, scale and depth remain fluid. Her compositions move away from the fixed viewpoint associated with Western linear perspective and toward a more relational understanding of pictorial space, in which no single vantage point governs the image.
In Bromlia Caranguejo (2026), dark twigs initially suggest a foreground, but the apparent landscape behind them is divided into green and ecru planes that resist any clear recession into depth. What appears to be scenery becomes instead a field of color, marks and intervals.
The physical presence of paint is particularly pronounced in several of the smaller works. Periquita, Caracol and Taturana, all from 2026, have mottled surfaces that recall weathered wallpaper or aging frescoes. Their titles refer to species native to Brazil, adding a specific geographic association to compositions that otherwise remain largely abstract. Passages of paint can suggest plumage, fur, shells or mineral deposits without resolving fully into any of them.
Pattern also plays an important role in Rheingantz’s work. In Manac (2026), repeated botanical forms and intermittent linear marks give the painted surface an almost woven quality. The artist has cited French Nabi painter douard Vuillard as an influence, particularly his ability to dissolve distinctions between figures, patterned walls and decorative surfaces. Rheingantz takes that visual ambiguity further, allowing repeated motifs to become landscape itself.
Her interest in textiles has increasingly moved beyond painting. In recent years, Rheingantz has explored embroidery and tapestry, working with her mother and Uruguayan artisan Jorge Francisco Soto. The embroidered work Outono (2026) is structured through rows of repeated stitches that stretch across the composition like furrows in cultivated land. Toward the bottom, these stitched passages become denser and more earthen, while small floating forms interrupt the strict order of the textile.
Although Rheingantz’s landscapes avoid representing identifiable sites, Brazil remains a persistent presence. It appears through references to native plants and animals, through memories of her childhood in Araraquara and through a broader material sensibility in which geography is treated not as something static, but as something continuously altered by time, weather and human intervention.
For Rheingantz, landscape is less a subject to be recorded than a condition in constant transformation. Her paintings mirror processes of growth, erosion, accumulation and disappearance, leaving their forms deliberately open and vulnerable to change.
Born in Araraquara in 1983, Rheingantz lives and works in So Paulo. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at ICA Milano, the Muse des Beaux-Arts in Nmes, Bortolami in New York, White Cube in London, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in So Paulo and FRAC Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand.
Her work has also appeared in major international exhibitions including the 15th Gwangju Biennale and the 14th Bienal do Mercosul, as well as presentations at Moderna Museet, Museum Voorlinden and the Museu de Arte do Rio.
Rheingantz is represented in numerous public and private collections, among them the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Pinacoteca do Estado de So Paulo and the Pinault Collection.
