Malu Ribeiro
THE BOWLER HAT TRILOGY+1 & BOHEMIAN NARRATIVES - Magical Realism (2018-2020) 18 artworks
Shifting gears in the last year and a half, Malu has been taking her skills and passion for color, light, and textures, perspectival and anatomical distortions, and cubism, to explore the characters she sees in her home (Europe) away from home (US). She brings a more contemporary touch to old themes, with elements of outsider art still playing with the issues of flatness versus spatial relationships in visual expression. Nostalgic for previous eras, even some which may not have quite existed be
QUARANTINE SERIES 7 artworks
During the infamous CoV mandated semi and full quarantine lockdown of 2020 in Portugal, Malu at times only had her room and a limited view from her window, to stare at a saddened nearly dead world, her relentless soul near gave up, but she reacted, claiming life and a future, she invades her work with colors and poetry, a yearning for living ...
Life of Sand, People of Clay (Magical Realism) 18 artworks
Vida de Areia, Gente de Barro (barro refers to mud but also to clay/ceramics) - I like to write the words in Portuguese too, because the words are so sonorous. In my double life as single person and mother, between Brooklyn and O Porto, and so many other things of life that bring duplicity, this album puts together works spanning decades but all connected in theme and earthy colors or materials. This gallery expresses a contrast, a dichotomy, not dissimilar to my double life. The dichotomy of th
STILL-LIFE/S (Not so Still Magical Realism) 10 artworks
With a still-life there's less pressure to invent, to come up with a theme, to have something to say ... one avoids the block of the empty white canvas as soon as one begins to make marks, one mark brings the response of the next mark, and so on, in a dialogue between maker, material and design ... making the process more intuitive and less conscious ... suddenly, I realize that there is plenty to say, among others, the visual dialogue with makers from the past, is a relevant to have ... My stil
THE GARDEN (Magical Realism) 5 artworks
Playing with color as light, and perceptions of spacial and temporal relativeness or subjectivity, with personal life references as well as a certain exoticism, Malu creates a perceptional imaginary world where time is slippery, while there’s an attempt at holding on to it, in the lull of an afternoon or rainy day, in the dusk of a day's end ...
GATES OF PERCEPTION - Earlier (Magical Realism) Works 5 artworks
These themes will repeat throughout her work, but particularly with the gallery named, Life of Sand. However, during these years Malu explored flatter and smoother surfaces, more literal forms of synthetic cubism, colors are light or temperatures. Still, personal references and themes permeate the work.
PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE COEXIST - THE EPHEMERAL (Early 2000s) 4 artworks
Large murals or installations, made of monoprints (these are normally created with electric dremel on plexyglass, ink and rubbing, etc) made spontaneously with a general idea of an image in mind. They are created purposefully offregister, which means the images off the press do not match perfectly its neighbor, the image comes to life as if in a puzzle, choosing the prints which match best the location, so print number 3 might be side by side with print number 12, the large overall image control
EARLY WORKS, "Magical Realism", elements of expressionism (a selection) 12 artworks
One of the hardest things for a spontaneous, sincere and searching artist, is to find that narrow focus and consistency galleries not only expect us to present in a website portfolio, but they themselves desire to present our work in such a focused path. Well, that is highly artificial, perhaps not so difficult to a young contemporary artist who has been conditioned in this manner by schooling or market forces, and/or uses limited elements of art & design. However, for a searching artist, it
