About the Artist
My paintings gather signs from the past: scraps and stitches of tenderness drawn from forgotten tales, collecting compass points, fables, and longings. They are tiny stories, endlessly unfolding into a thousand others, stretching backward and forward through time.
What moves through them is not nostalgia, but a gentle melancholy - the quiet realization of the foggy, fluid substance of memory, slipping through our hands like water, refusing to be held.
I paint as someone trying to suspend instants, to shelter presences, to leave traces.
The figure that returns across my canvases is never a fixed portrait and it does not seek resemblance. What begins as a self-portrait loosens from likeness.
Each image becomes a variation, a tremor, a recalibration of the same inner axis.The face changes, the posture alters, the gaze withdraws or confronts, and in these subtle displacements, identity loosens its borders.
These are not attempts to define who I am, but to inhabit the space of impermanence itself.
With every painting, something is shed and something is carried forward, and the figures present themselves not as mirrors, but as thresholds. Across time, they accumulate like fragments of an unfinished utterance, rooted within a symbolic architecture where memory, history, and interiority converge, and where inner landscapes open onto older, sedimented time.
In bringing into my paintings references from art history, in evoking words written long ago, I reenact gestures that are older than I am within the noise of the present. I summon overlapping times: the hands that created centuries ago pass silently through mine, and painting suddenly becomes not only an act of invention, but also an act of witnessing. In doing so, time folds in on itself, and within the present tense of the work emerging beneath my fingers, the past is not behind me, but breathing alive in every brushstroke.
Chronology loosens its grip, and it is memory, again and again, making the world spin and tying us all together like a phantom thread.
I paint not to preserve, but to insist. Not to fix, but to echo
Ana Monteiro (b.1990) is a Portuguese figurative artist whose practice reflects on the nature of memory through an aesthetic shaped by symbolism and magical realism.
She holds an MA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and a BA in Painting from the same institution and exhibits regularly since 2011.
Her paintings function as deeply symbolic structures, at once unsettling and alluring - places in which biographical and historical references intertwine in an evocation of memory’s substance: a stratified field crossed by the living and the dead, reminding us that even in absence, we exert a subtle force upon the world, enough to alter the texture of what follows.
They are turns of a spiral made of memory, where the notions of self and presence are not something to be settled, but something that persists. Defiantly, stubbornly, wonderfully.
Solo Exhibitions
2025
Once Upon a Time - CK Contemporary, San Francisco, (USA).
2024
Tales Telling Tales - Galerie Schwind, Berlin, (Germany).
2021
The Myth of Sisyphus - Museu Nogueira da Silva, Braga.
2019
The Uncanny - Espaço Exibicionista, Lisboa.
The Hidden Place - Ap’Arte Galeria, Porto.
2018
Flatland - Espaço Exibicionista, Lisboa.
2016
Desidentidades - Ap’Arte Galeria, Porto.
Bojador - Museu Nogueira da Silva, Braga.
2014
Do Amor e Outros Demónios - Ap’Arte Galeria, Porto.
2012
Narciso - Museu Nogueira da Silva, Braga.
Group Exhibitions
2023
Discoveries - Galerie Schwind, Berlin (Germany).
CK Contemporary: The first decade - CK Contemporary, San Francisco, (USA).
2022
Out of the Shadows - CK Contemporary, San Francisco, (USA).
2021
Storytellers - CK Contemporary, San Francisco, (USA).
2020
Dilema - Espaço Exibicionista, Lisboa.
2019
Dia D - Espaço Exibicionista, Lisboa.
Bienal de Gaia - Casa da Cultura, Alfândega da Fé.
2018
Pop Corn - Espaço Exibicionista, Lisboa.
2017
30x30 - Galeria Acervo, Lisboa.
Les uns e les autres - Ap’Arte Galeria, Porto.
Colectiva de Artistas Contemporâneos - Ap’Arte Galeria, Porto.
2016
Os Novos Paradigmas da Arte Contemporânea - Piola - Jardins, São Paulo (Brasil).
Encontros - Museu Memorial da América Latina, São Paulo (Brasil).
A Mágica da Mobilidade - Consulado de Portugal, São Paulo (Brasil).
Ano das Artes Brasil em Portugal e Portugal no Brasil - Ap’Arte Galeria, Porto.
2013
Em Suma - Museu da Faculdade de Belas Artes da UP, Porto.
2012
Match Point - Galeria Municipal do Porto, Porto.
XXV Salão de Primavera / Prémio Rainha Isabel de Bragança - Galeria de Arte do Casino Estoril, Lisboa.
2011
Sobre o Corpo - Casa-Museu Guerra Junqueiro, Porto.
2026
Art Karlsruhe - (Galerie Schwind) - Germany
2025
Art Karlsruhe - (Galerie Schwind) - Germany
Art Market San Francisco - (CK Contemporary) - San Francisco, (USA).
2024
Art Karlsruhe - (Galerie Schwind) - Germany
Art Market San Francisco - (CK Contemporary) - San Francisco, (USA).
2023
Art Market San Francisco - (CK Contemporary) - San Francisco, (USA).
2022
Art Market San Francisco - (CK Contemporary) - San Francisco, (USA).
Art Fairs
Comissions
2022
Mural “Origens” - Campo da Ataca, Guimarães.
2014 - 2015
Mural - dst Group, Braga.