It is with enthusiasm that Almeida & Dale announces the representation of Rodrigo Andrade (1962, São Paulo).  

An essential figure in Brazilian contemporary art, Rodrigo Andrade has developed a work marked by deep investigation and boundless experimentation with painting—in its material, visual, and historical aspects. The artist spins up continuous reflection regarding his foundations and possibilities, exploring the connections between matter and expression, gesture and repetition, image and sensation. In his practice, the pictorial surface becomes a field of permanent tension, where thick layers of paint accumulate or dissolve, shaping landscapes, spaces, objects, and graphic forms in constant flux. His dense, intense compositions reflect the pulse and mutable character of life, while his body of work stands as a testament to the vitality and elasticity of contemporary painting, incorporating multiple references, techniques, and themes. Between conceptual rigor and intuitive manifestation, between physicality and iconography, his work consistently seeks to offer a renewed gaze upon the history of painting and its capacity to think, represent, and transform the dynamics of the world.  

In the early 1980s, when he started his career, Andrade’s artworks were marked by energetic vigor, strong gestures, and material density, traits that would remain central throughout his oeuvre. In that same decade, alongside artist friends, he founded the collective studio that would come to be known as Casa 7 (House 7), which was acclaimed in the 18th Bienal de São Paulo—an emblematic exhibit that became known as “A Grande Tela” (The Great Painting).  

Since then, Andrade has maintained a practice of experimentation and reinvention of his own vocabulary in a pendular movement between abstraction and figuration, lightness and density, painting and object, and the historical and the ordinary. Personal photographs, news images, references to art history, and paintings by other artists get absorbed and reformulated into compositions loaded with dense material layers and imbued with a psychological and emotional dimension.  

Mutation is both the subject and the method: his paintings result from a process where each gesture converts into another, where the blotch becomes a block, the block becomes an object, and the object turns into space, underlining the world as matter in transit. Likewise, his practice incorporates the impetus of transformation, always opening itself up to novel paths and existential possibilities.  

Rodrigo Andrade was featured in the 18th and 19th Bienal de São Paulo and the 24th and 29th Panorama da Arte Brasileira, held by MAM São Paulo; and had retrospective shows at institutions such as Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, and Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba. His works are part of the collections of MAM São Paulo; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; MAC Niterói; MAC USP; Museu de Arte da Pampulha; and Instituto Itaú Cultural.