Mano Penalva

Mano Penalva (b. 1987, Salvador, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo. His artistic practice stems from the displacement of objects from their everyday contexts and reflects his interest in Anthropology and Material Culture. Working across sculpture, installation, painting, photography, and video, Penalva proposes new aesthetic groupings inspired by retail display strategies, his collection of stories, and observations of the space that exists between the Home and the Street. Through his work, Penalva emphasises the idea that the exponential proliferation of objects and images is not intended to train perception or awareness, but rather to merge us with them. His works are part of numerous public and private collections in Brazil and abroad, including the CIFO – Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (USA), the Frédéric de Goldschmidt Collection (Belgium), the National Museum/UFRJ (Brazil), MAC Paraná – Museum of Contemporary Art of Paraná (Brazil), and MARP – Ribeirão Preto Museum of Art (Brazil). He holds a Bachelor's degree in Social Communication from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (2008) and attended independent art courses at Parque Lage for seven years (2005–2011). He is currently part of Massapê Projetos, an artist-run platform for artistic thinking and production based in São Paulo, which he founded.