Cristina Canale (b. 1961, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) rose to prominence following her participation in the iconic group exhibition Como vai você, Geração 80?, at Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage (EAV Parque Lage) in Rio de Janeiro in 1984. Like many of her colleagues from the so-called “Generation 80”, her early works reveal the influence of the international context as painting resurfaced, especially with that of German Neo-expressionism. Loaded with visual elements and thick paint, her early paintings have a material or textural characteristic that is reinforced by her use of contrasting and vivid colors. In the early 1990s, Canale moved to Germany to study in Düsseldorf under the guidance of the Dutch conceptual artist Jan Dibbets. Her compositions soon acquired a sense of spatiality, as she began to incorporate the use of planes and depth, while also adding greater fluidity to her use of colors.

Cristina Canale’s work is often based off prosaic everyday scenes, which she extracts from advertising photography. Her paintings result in elaborate compositions that intertwine the figurative and the abstract, often blurring one with the other. According to the curator Tiago Mesquita, Canale’s production opposes the quest for constituing structures of the image, which artists such as Gerhard Richter and Robert Ryman engage with, tackling instead “the image and established genres of painting in a subjective manner following the belief in a singular experience.”

Cristina Canale lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her recent solo exhibitions include: The Encounter, at Nara Roesler (2021), in New York, United States; Cabeças/Falantes, at Galeria Nara Roesler (2018).