Brazilian artist, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Marcela develops paintings that intertwine historical images from the universe of politics to representations of contemporary visual culture. Part of her pictorial inventions comes from a research on the struggles waged by women around the world, such as the work Sônia, which pays homage to a riverside communist guerrilla woman killed by military agents in the Araguaia region, during Brazil's first military coup in 1964.
Cantuária elaborates confrontations narratives for a society structured in sexism and misogyny, thus creating her own vocabulary, whose particularities are cohesive with the creative process, the chromatic palette and the articulations that emerge from the open and latent layers of her paintings. Influences spread in a curious combination, the works are reconnections with social facts that have been repeatedly diminished, erased or badly treated by history, so her body of work seeks to dialogue with questions about the position of women in society, class struggle, division of powers, gender stereotypes and disputes over political meanings.
Film frames, media and journalistic images, figurative miscellany of the unconscious and daily photographic records depict women's bodies, soldiers, burning landscapes, domestic animals and wild beasts integrate Marcela's canvases in an intercrossed and anachronistic plan, circular and confusing, like the contemporary image rotational system, typical of how virtual communication networks play mindsets.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in Painting from the UFRJ School of Fine Arts. In 2020, she was invited to participate in the FountainHead Residence, in Miami, USA, and in an exhibition at the Museu Instituto de América, in Spain. In 2019 opens, in the gallery A Gentil Carioca, the solo show “La larga noche de los 500 años”, the same year she showed “Suturar Libertar” at Centro Municipal de Arte Helio Oiticica and took part in “Histórias Feministas” at MASP and “Estratégias do Feminino” at the Farol Santander in Porto Alegre, also participated in the Kaaysa Residency in São Paulo and in the PAOS GDL, México.
Her works are part of the collections of Museu da Maré, in Rio, and Museu de Arte de São Paulo.