Afro-Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino’s work is being celebrated on the High Line, in New York City

Rosana Paulino’s practice spans drawing, painting, suture, printmaking, collage, sculpture, and installation. Her work foregrounds social, ethnic, and gender issues, taking particular care to explore the lasting legacy of slavery and the history of both racial and gender-based violence in Brazil.
The artist weaves personal, scientific, and historical archives throughout her work, using these materials to demonstrate and then deconstruct violent colonial structures, particularly as they relate to Afro-Brazilian women.
Considering the impact these archives and memories have on collective values and belief systems, Paulino examines the construction of myths—not only as an aesthetic pillar but also as a key influence on cultural consciousness.
The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night continues the artist’s mangrove series, which depicts tree-women as a mythological archetype and symbol for the Brazilian biome. Paulino notes that mangroves, like the country’s Black and Indigenous people, have been mistreated and exploited. The artist highlights the symbolic meaning inherent in this ecosystem: It is where life begins, as a home for countless species as a blue carbon reservoir, and where life ends due to the decomposition of the mangrove itself.
In The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night, Paulino re-imagines this duality between life and death as day and night. From left to right, the color of the sky fades from daylight to a deeper, midnight hue. In lieu of gilded halos traditionally seen in European representations of holy figures, the tree-women’s heads are framed by halos resembling the sun and the moon.
Similarly, the animals surrounding the goddesses also reference the transition from day to night. On the left side of the composition, Paulino depicts two diurnal birds native to the mangrove biome: the white egret and, in the tree-woman’s hands, the scarlet ibis. To her right, the other goddess holds an owl and is flanked by two bats, both of which are nocturnal. Together, these elements present a rich, new mythological framework for the mangrove, offering a departure from depictions shaped by colonization and exploitation.
In recent years, Paulino – one of Brazil’s most prominent visual artists – has exhibited her work in museums across Germany, the US, and Italy. In November, she unveiled a 9-metre-tall mural at New York’s High Line, and Tate Modern has confirmed that it is acquiring one of her pieces.
Paulino received the inaugural award for artistic freedom granted by the Munch Museum in Oslo. Announcing its decision, the jury stated: “Rosana Paulino has contributed to some of the most important conversations about art, history, and society in Brazil and beyond,” adding that the artist “has been a leading voice in black feminism, with a steadfast commitment to the struggle of afro-Brazilian communities and the ongoing fight against racism.”
The techniques she has used throughout her 30-year career include embroidery, collage, painting, and sculpture. But the central theme is often the same: “I want to bring to the table the issue of what it means to be a Black woman in a racist country like Brazil,” she said.
This is precisely what makes Paulino’s work “universal” according to Andrea Giunta, co-curator (along with Igor Simões) of her exhibition at Malba.
“Slavery was not just a problem for Brazil, but for the Americas,” said Giunta, an art professor at the University of Buenos Aires. “Europe is also deeply involved in Paulino’s reflections, which are universal in a geographical sense and terms of social justice.”
For Paulino, the pain caused by the diaspora of Africans “is present in Latin America, in the US, and here in Europe with immigrants,” she said from a hotel in Oslo, waiting for the award ceremony. “And this is making my work reach audiences I never expected.”
Born and raised in a working-class neighborhood in São Paulo, Paulino first discovered “Black art” in her teenage years at a samba school parade during Carnival. “The theme of that Mocidade Alegre’s parade was about Brazilian artists, the few that were acknowledged at the time,” she said.
With a talent for drawing she’d had since childhood, she decided to pursue a degree in art at university.
In 2011, Paulino became the first black Brazilian woman to obtain a PhD in visual arts. “To have an academic validation was a strategy I devised so that my voice could be heard …Brazilian art has always been very white and elitist, which, with few exceptions, has made the work of Black artists invisible,” she said.
In recent years, representation has improved, but she emphasizes that no one opened doors out of “kindness:” “Brazilian institutions were forced to act because they were experiencing international embarrassment, with an entirely white and Eurocentric market that ignored its own country,” she said.
For the Brazilian curator Janaína Damaceno, “one of the great qualities of Paulino’s work is that she’s an incredible researcher.”
The artist intends to use most of the cash prize from the Munch Award – (£20,000) – to establish the Rosana Paulino Institute, which will be built in a working-class neighborhood of São Paulo. The institute will serve as an image library and study documenting representations of Black people.
This year, Paulino will stop teaching as an art professor and dedicate herself entirely to her art. “I want to spend time in my studio, producing, researching, and experimenting with new materials or new ways of using materials.
“I want to be able not to have to be political all the time, not to devise so many strategies all the time …We don’t see this same kind of pressure on white artists,” she said.