Maria Gomes

About

Gomes explores perception, spatiality, and the gaze – framing painting as a site of encounter in which both subject and viewer become mutually aware. By placing suggestive, amorphous forms within highly organised environments, she evokes the performativity of female experience. This dynamic extends into the relationship between her paintings and sculptures. Through this interplay, the gaze is redistributed multilaterally; moving across viewers and objects without hierarchy or fixed orientation. The artist’s work reflects the anxieties of contemporary life and creative practices, while critically interrogating the complexities of self-presentation.

In “As Três Marias”, Gomes merges painting, relief, and sculpture into a single installation. Inspired by the domestic entertainment units of her childhood, she brings her painted beings into physical space through carved wood — a material she connects with deeply, having grown up surrounded by it in rural Portugal.

The title references Maria Velho da Costa, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Isabel Barreno – authors of Novas Cartas Portuguesas (The Three Marias) – a groundbreaking feminist text that challenged traditional roles and values in 1970s Portugal.

As literary critic Linda S. Kauffman describes:

“Each Maria thus serves as analyst as well as reader-critic for the other two… They purposely shift roles from analyst to analysand repeatedly… their own image for the process is an open parabola… suggesting the dynamic relationship between three shifting entities, three bodies that want to remain open to experimentation, to suggestion, to analysis, to each other.”

In this spirit, “As Três Marias” becomes a site of shifting identities and ongoing critique – a dialogue across mediums and generations. It encapsulates Gomes’ practice: rooted in self exploration, yet expansive and open-ended, moving fluidly between sculpture, relief, and painting.