IMPERMANENTIA: Solo Show by Ana Malta

  • A mais planos sem enganos, 2025, Ana Malta
  • ABOUT THE ARTIST, (b. 1996, Portugal)

    ABOUT THE ARTIST

    (b. 1996, Portugal)

    ANA MALTA is a visual artist who lives and works in Lisbon. With an academic background in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and a master's degree in Creative Industries Management from UCP-Porto, Malta develops work in which color, patterns, and composition become the foundation of her visual expression. Her artistic practice is driven by aesthetic restlessness and the transformative potential of "error" as a creative tool.

    Malta's work goes beyond the exploration of form and color; it becomes a space for investigating expression, the body, memory, and the relationship between the tangible and the unconscious. Her aesthetic pursuit is marked by contrasts, the study of compositional possibilities, and the interaction between error and intentionality. Ana Malta creates not just images but visual experiences that engage with the viewer's perception and emotion.

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  • ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

    “Impermanentia” presents a series of entirely new pastel works created throughout 2025, through which Ana Malta deepens her investigation into the relationships between body, memory, time, and intimate space.
    Distinguished by the chromatic intensity and gestural expressiveness of her visual language, Malta consistently consecrates the body — repeatedly depicted — as a living archive of emotions and recollections, revealing the fragility and mutability of identity.
    At the genesis of her work lies a particular fascination with short-term memory and its volatile, fragmentary, and sensorial nature. Building upon this premise, her pictorial practice invokes psychic automatism, central to the Surrealist tradition, as a method of exploring gesture and the unconscious — allowing error to become a poetic possibility and transforming the act of drawing and painting into a process of intuitive discovery.
    Her compositions emerge from primordial stains, seemingly arbitrary, which serve as the structural matrix of the creative process — a territory of indeterminacy where form gradually reveals itself. From this foundation, Malta establishes an inner order that organises visual and emotional chaos, transforming the spontaneity of gesture and the fluidity of memory into records of ephemeral experiences. The result is an emotional cartography in perpetual construction, where chance, colour, and the reiteration of gesture sustain a dialogue between control and freedom, intuition and consciousness.
  • The exhibition’s title derives from the artist’s homonymous work, which serves as its conceptual axis — an artist’s book composed...
    The exhibition’s title derives from the artist’s homonymous work, which serves as its conceptual axis — an artist’s book composed of paintings on textile support, whose physical and narrative structure remains in constant transformation. Conceived as an object of reading and contemplation, the book unfolds into folios that, once disassembled and rearranged, configure a unique double-sided painting, capable of being installed, reinstalled, or reconverted into its original form according to the artist’s gesture or intent.
    This mutating condition — between object and painting, intimacy and exposure, stasis and performance — endows the work with an ephemeral and reversible nature, rendering it equally susceptible to activation as a happening. The piece situates itself within the tradition of artist’s books that question the boundaries between text, image, and object, proposing new forms of reading and aesthetic experience.
    It stands as a metaphor for cultural impermanence — a living body that disassembles and recomposes, that absorbs, alters, and incorporates new elements: a symbolic and symbiotic organism in a continual process of regeneration. Its open and cumulative structure reflects the transitory nature of life and culture, understood not as a fixed archive but as a matrix in motion, subject to time’s erosion, reinterpretation, and inevitable transformation. Impermanentia thus emerges as a reflection on the instability of form and memory, and simultaneously on the vitality of Ana Malta’s artistic practice as an act of perpetual reinvention. 
  • The exhibition also features “Papel de Parede”, a collaborative work conceived by the artistic collective Vês.Três, formed by Ana Malta,...
    The exhibition also features “Papel de Parede”, a collaborative work conceived by the artistic collective Vês.Três, formed by Ana Malta, Madalena Pequito, and Maria de Brito Matias. Comprising a continuous 10-metre-long painted roll executed through a shared gesture, the work is sold by the metre throughout the exhibition — a performative act of critique directed at the commodification of art, excessive consumerism, and the housing inaccessibility crisis that defines contemporary Portugal. The title — of seemingly domestic banality — is, however, deeply ironic: the “wallpaper” becomes a visual metaphor for the aesthetic surface as a consumer product, but also a collective palimpsest, where gestures, intentions, and identities overlap.
    Its inclusion within Impermanentia reaffirms Malta’s engagement with collaborative processes and shared creation, aligning her practice once again with that of the Surrealist movement, which, through experiments such as the “cadavre exquis”, sought to liberate artistic creation from the hierarchies of authorship and the confines of rational logic. Through the collective Vês.Três, this legacy is reinterpreted in the light of contemporary practice, transforming collaboration into a poetic and political gesture of resistance against the individualism and market structures that dominate today’s art production.
    The resulting work — born of consonance — manifests as a hybrid and ephemeral object, simultaneously artwork, action, and commentary, restoring to the viewer an awareness of the transience of aesthetic, economic, and cultural values upon which the very notion of permanence is founded.

  • AVALIABLE ARTWORKS

    • Ana Malta Longe ou Perto... É um aperto, 2025 Acrylic, oil bars and dry pastel on canvas (Mixed media) 200 x 154 cm
      Ana Malta
      Longe ou Perto... É um aperto, 2025
      Acrylic, oil bars and dry pastel on canvas (Mixed media)
      200 x 154 cm
      ENQUIRE
    • Ana Malta, Bis, Bis, Bis, 2025
      Ana Malta, Bis, Bis, Bis, 2025
      ENQUIRE
    • Ana Malta Esqueço-me Segundos, 2025 Acrylic, soft pastel, and oil bar on canvas 150 x 100 cm
      Ana Malta
      Esqueço-me Segundos, 2025
      Acrylic, soft pastel, and oil bar on canvas
      150 x 100 cm
      ENQUIRE
    • Ana Malta Pausas das Causas, 2025 Acrylic, soft pastel, and oil bar on canvas 150 x 100 cm
      Ana Malta
      Pausas das Causas, 2025
      Acrylic, soft pastel, and oil bar on canvas
      150 x 100 cm
      ENQUIRE
    • Ana Malta Cura-me as Verdades, 2025 Acrylic and soft pastel on paper 50 x 65 cm
      Ana Malta
      Cura-me as Verdades, 2025
      Acrylic and soft pastel on paper
      50 x 65 cm
      ENQUIRE
    • Ana Malta, Poucos ventos, muitas tempestades, 2025
      Ana Malta, Poucos ventos, muitas tempestades, 2025
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    • Ana Malta Anseio um já, num logo, 2025 Acrylic and soft pastel on paper 50 x 65 cm
      Ana Malta
      Anseio um já, num logo, 2025
      Acrylic and soft pastel on paper
      50 x 65 cm
      ENQUIRE
    • Ana Malta, Onde Está Vontade Está Bondade, 2025
      Ana Malta, Onde Está Vontade Está Bondade, 2025
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    • Ana Malta Não há ventríloquo sem o boneco, 2025 Acrylic, soft pastel, and oil bar on canvas 150 x 100 cm
      Ana Malta
      Não há ventríloquo sem o boneco, 2025
      Acrylic, soft pastel, and oil bar on canvas
      150 x 100 cm
      ENQUIRE
    • Ana Malta, Quanto custa a inteligência?, 2025
      Ana Malta, Quanto custa a inteligência?, 2025
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    • Ana Malta Não aceito devoluções, 2025 Acrylic, soft pastel, and oil bar on canvas 150 x 100 cm
      Ana Malta
      Não aceito devoluções, 2025
      Acrylic, soft pastel, and oil bar on canvas
      150 x 100 cm
      ENQUIRE
    • Ana Malta, Todos soluçamos, 2025
      Ana Malta, Todos soluçamos, 2025
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    • Ana Malta, A mais planos sem enganos, 2025
      Ana Malta, A mais planos sem enganos, 2025
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    • Ana Malta Impermanentia, 2025 Mixed Media A3 in book / 84 x 115 cm open
      Ana Malta
      Impermanentia, 2025
      Mixed Media
      A3 in book / 84 x 115 cm open
      ENQUIRE

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    ABOUT THE GALLERY

     
    THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE is an international contemporary art gallery based in Lisbon (Portugal). Representing and collaborating with emergent and established artists, the gallery focuses primarily on narratives associated with the African continent and its diaspora. Beyond its deep connection to Africa — and with a pioneering spirit of de-compartmentalization and inclusiveness, favouring intercultural dialogues — it is the first African gallery in Portugal to open its collaborative circle to both local artists and artistic productions from the Global South, including Brazil and non-lusophone African countries. The gallery maintains a regular and significant presence at important international art fairs.
     
    THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE extends its dynamic activities to several institutional and independent spaces with the organization of ambitious collective exhibitions outside the gallery’s walls, through exhibition projects that enhance the expansion of the art world to a multiplicity of locations, inviting curators and artists in occasional collaborations that provide enriching visions and dialogues.

     

    CONTACTS

    E-MAIL: gallery@thisisnotawhitecube.com

    Sónia Ribeiro - CEO and Artistic Director: sonia.ribeiro@thisisnotawhitecube.com / +351 967 042 186 / +33621863877

    Graça Rodrigues - Director and Curator: graca.rodrigues@thisisnotawhitecube.com / +351 967 260 472

  • IMPERMANENTIA

    Exposição Individual de Ana Malta “Impermanentia” apresenta um conjunto inédito de obras executadas a pastel ao longo de 2025, através do qual Ana Malta aprofunda a sua pesquisa em torno das relações entre corpo, memória,...