Aline Bittar Kunzel

About

Bittar Künzel (b. 1997) is a Brazilian artist whose painting-based practice centres on mechanisms to capture and visualize shifting perceptions of landscape and our place within it. Her work explores the tension in our relationship with landscape, where the natural world can manifest itself as at once consoling and disquieting. This emotional dissonance unfolds through layered compositions in ink, acrylic, and oil, where forms develop gradually and remain deliberately open-ended.

A recurring focus in her recent work is water, approached as a force that embodies this same contradiction. Central to many of these paintings are elliptical, pond-like shapes that emerge through intuitive gestures—loose, circular brush movements that eventually meet themselves. These forms began as traced impressions of uneven organic contours, initially referencing ponds and lakes, but over time gradually asserted themselves as subjects in their own right.

Thoreau’s idea of the pond as “the earth’s eye,” and his suggestion that “the reflection in water is the first view that the universe has of itself,” are recurring references in Bittar Künzel’s practice, casting these forms as perceptual thresholds. Swimming in ponds is also part of her inquiry: a direct, embodied experience of being immersed in the landscape while remaining distinctly separate from it.

Several of her works unfold across multiple canvases, using collage-like gestures of layering, cropping, and removal to explore the tension between fragmentation and cohesion. Ambiguity of scale—whether a microscopic trace or an expansive sea—invites viewers into spaces that shift between intimacy and immensity, control and fluidity.