BIO
Carolina Paz is a Brazilian artist working across painting, installation, text, video, and participatory forms. Words are central to her practice, alongside an ongoing interest in poetic thought and the micro-social structures through which people relate to one another. Her work develops through iteration, displacement, attentive presence, and the creation of situations that allow relationships and meanings to be reorganized.
Curatorial and pedagogical practices are part of her artistic trajectory. Since 2018, she has developed Uncool Artist as an artist-led structure for experimental artistic development and exchange. From 2023 to 2026, she was an artist member and board member at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. From 2010 to 2017, she directed Coletivo 2e1 in São Paulo.
Her work has been presented in museums, biennials, institutional venues, and artist-run spaces in Brazil, the United States, Spain, Portugal, and Argentina. She received the Funarte Visual Arts Prize, and her work is held in public and private collections in Brazil, the United States, and Europe.
Paz holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and graduate degrees in Social Sciences and Media and Knowledge from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil.
I like to think of my work as a philosophical practice of intimacy. I make small paintings, work with words, build compositions from repeated units, and create works I call “occasions” that others can activate. I am interested in what happens when something is changed by contact without ceasing to be itself.
This question appears materially in the work. A painting may fit in the hand or be held inside a grid. A word can shift according to where it is placed. In other works, separate elements can be moved and rearranged, so that the work remains recognizable but never entirely fixed.
Repetition is important to me because it allows difference to appear slowly. I also return to containers and simple systems. They give me a way to work with change within forms.
Some works unfold through an exchange with other people. Others depend on someone entering the work and altering it. I define the conditions carefully, then leave space for what I could not have planned. Others can act within those conditions, while I remain attentive to how the work unfolds.
At the center of my practice is a desire to become less fixed in relation to the world. I am interested in how identity can loosen through contact with other people and with what exceeds us. Art gives me a way to approach that experience through my own body and time, without having to resolve it, only witness it.
My pedagogical and curatorial work grows from the same impulse. I create structures where people can think together and where something unexpected can take form.
Always in affection, because every encounter affects and is affected.
Always in becoming, because I exist.