Marina Rheingantz

Lending its title to the exhibition at White Cube Seoul, Míope (2026) takes its name from the Portuguese word for ‘nearsighted’, a condition that could aptly describe Rheingantz’s landscapes more broadly, involving forms often caught at the edge of focus. Fragmented botanical motifs ripple across the surface in vivid sprays of mauve, lavender and ochre, rendered with a precision reminiscent of Pointillism. The delicacy of this brushwork sits at odds with the painting’s enveloping fog, engendering a tension between passages of haziness and hyper-focus. Certain passages appear to repeat or overlay one another, producing the impression of double, even triple vision, as though the eye were grasping at an image already withdrawing from view. Pipa (2026), the largest canvas on display, demonstrates a similar spatial instability. A cloud-like form blooms at the centre of the canvas against a pale pink expanse, floating over what could be a stretch of scrubby vegetation. Though the scene initially appears airborne, a constellation of dispersed markings suggests fronds and seedheads, stems and flowers, drawing the composition back towards the earth and complicating any coherent sense of perspective and orientation.  

In Rheingantz’s landscapes, perspective is rarely allowed to settle. Horizon lines and definitive spatial markers fall away, leaving the eye to move between uncertain registers of distance and scale. In this respect, Rheingantz departs from the organising logic of Western linear perspective, in which pictorial depth is organised around a fixed viewpoint, finding affinities instead with East Asian frameworks that ‘emphasise relational instead of hierarchical spatial structures’.1  Pictorial space emerges through the shifting relation of marks and intervals, without any single vantage presiding over the whole. Bromélia Caranguejo (2026) begins with the suggestion of a more conventional spatial order, where silhouetted twigs occupy an apparent foreground, yet the landscape ‘beyond’ is divided into planes of green and ecru that remain spatially indeterminate, resisting an orderly recession into depth.  

While pictorial depth remains elusive in Rheingantz’s works, the painted surface itself is always emphatically present, notably asserting itself in a number of smaller-scale paintings where methods of staining, oil stick and deposits of impasto give the canvases the appearance of having been weathered and worked over through time. The mottled surfaces of Periquita, Caracol and Taturana (all 2026) recall stripped-back wallpaper or the degraded surfaces of aged frescoes. Rheingantz’s process, by her own account, moves between layering and removal, using turpentine to dilute the pigment and allow it to bleed and run down the canvas, ceding a measure of agency to her materials. Taking their titles from species native to Brazil, the works introduce specific referents into compositions that otherwise remain wholly abstract, lending passages of paint associations with the textures of plumage, fur, shell or the accretion of mineral deposits across the painted ground.  

This tendency towards patterned repetition takes on an almost textile quality in paintings such as Manacá (2026), whose fluid botanical forms are articulated through intermittent linear marks that evoke the tactility of woven thread. This compression of motif and ground calls to mind the French Nabis painter Édouard Vuillard, an artist Rheingantz has cited among her artistic influences, whose domestic interiors appear to merge the distinctions between figure, ornament and patterned wallpaper, allowing each to lay equal claim to the pictorial surface. Rheingantz pushes this indistinction further still, allowing the repeated forms to assume the character of terrain. In recent years, she has extended this concern with pattern and materiality into embroidery and tapestry, collaborating with her mother and the Uruguayan artisan Jorge Francisco Soto. In the embroidered work Outono (2026) horizontal rows of iterative stitchwork run the width of the composition like furrows of tilled land, accruing into earthier passages towards the lower edge, while small, unanchored forms drift across the field with a looseness that appears to belie the discipline and labour of their stitched construction.  

Though Rheingantz’s paintings resist identification with any particular site, Brazil nevertheless remains a constant touchstone: embedded in references to wildlife native to the country, in recollections of the artist’s upbringing in rural Araraquara, and, more diffusely, in the material sensibility of the works themselves. Across them, Brazil’s shifting geography never quite resolves into a stable view, but is instead absorbed into the material processes through which each work takes shape. For Rheingantz, landscape exists in a state of transition; forms remain contingent, much as the land it draws from is subject to continual processes of alteration and remaking.  

Marina Rheingantz (b. 1983, Araraquara, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at ICA Milano, Italy (2025–26); Bortolami, New York (2025); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes, France (2025); White Cube, London (2023); Fortes d’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, Brazil (2022); FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France (2021); Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2021); Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2016); Independent Projects, New York (2014); Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil (2012); and Centro Universitário Maria Antonia USP, São Paulo, Brazil (2011).  

Rheingantz’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2025); 14th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2025); 15th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2024); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2024); Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands (2023); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2022); Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2020); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2018); Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil (2018); LITEXPO, Vilnius, Lithuania (2017); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2016); Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); The Rubell Family Collection / Contemporary Art Foundation, Miami, Florida (2016); Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2015); Contemporary Arts Foundation, Miami, Florida (2015); and The Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan (2015).  

Her work is held in international collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; Pinault Collection, Paris; Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo; and Tate, London.