Julia Pereira: Contemporary Visual Artist and Painter

Julia Pereira is a prominent Brazilian visual artist whose practice is characterized by a profound exploration of memory, autobiography, and the human condition. Based in So Paulo, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts with a focus on Painting, Printmaking, and Sculpture from the Centro Universitrio Belas Artes, where she was recognized as the top student in her class. Her academic background is further enriched by a Post-Graduate degree in Art History—Theory and Criticism, as well as specialized studies in Neuroscience and Art. Nourished by personal memories in which sensation and intuition act as triggers for my work in painting and video, I begin projects that are deeply process-driven and that quickly merge multiple dualities—abstraction/figuration, death/life, emptiness/wholeness, transience/eternity—which consequently tension my initial attempt to rework affective experiences. The resulting accumulation of material evokes other organic images, which become bound to thoughts on the intersections between the body, relationships, and the forces of nature. How close are shoulders to mountains, and feelings to water? Pereira is interested in fields of study such as neuroscience (the ambivalence between the intention to record a visual or sensory memory through gesture and the body’s unconscious movements); astronomy and philosophy (for ideas about the intangibility of time); psychology (for human behavior, the unconscious, and sexuality); cinematography and dance (for notions of moving images); certain periods of art (such as the Baroque, Romanticism, and Surrealism); and any other form through which one might discuss ideas about image-making, time, emptiness, love, pain, and desire.