POROUS BODIES, THOUGHT IN ACTION: CAROLINA PAZ IN NEW YORK
The Brazilian artist presents an exhibition that activates public participation and shifts painting toward the terrain of relationality, abstraction, and collective transformation.
A.I.R. Gallery presents imagining spaces, an exhibition of recent work by artist Carolina Paz (1976, São Paulo, Brazil). Featuring a participatory installation and three ongoing series of small-scale paintings, the exhibition explores the intersections between art-making and “art-thinking,” reflecting on how artistic processes can generate new ways of sensing, thinking, and being together.
Curated by Iara Pimenta, this is Paz’s first solo exhibition in New York City. Her artistic practice engages with the philosophy of Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, bell hooks, Suely Rolnik, Gilles Deleuze, and Baruch Spinoza, particularly their reflections on transformation and relational existence. She approaches art as a conceptual and formal expression of sensations and affects, working through the idea of a porous body that acts, responds, and is altered in relation to others. In this continual exchange, transformation unfolds as a shared and collective experience.
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Photography by Matthew Sherman (A.I.R. Gallery)
The exhibition is anchored by the eponymous participatory installation imagining spaces (2025), composed of 1,200 hand-painted wooden cubes (1 inch each) in six pastel palettes arranged directly on the gallery floor. The installation invites visitors to build configurations of cubes in response to simple weekly prompts. As they sit or crouch to trace lines, squares, stacks, or curves, participants co-create the work according to their own imagination.
Three ongoing series of small-scale paintings — wording (since 2020), square fields (since 2021), and grid (since 2024) — share a tactile quality, using abstraction to cultivate connection through enveloping textures and colors. The wording works feature diagrammatic compositions that place words such as “space” and “room” alongside geometric shapes like triangles and circles. The other two series explore the grid as a site of relation and becoming, with dynamic modular compositions of intersecting edges and layered reliefs in oil and wax.
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Photography by Matthew Sherman (A.I.R. Gallery)
imagining spaces marks a turning point in Paz’s practice, as she shifts from an earlier focus on representation and identity to investigate abstraction’s capacity to engender connection and exchange. Engaging visitors as both makers and thinkers, the exhibition offers a layered inquiry into poetics, social ethics, abstraction, and shared transformation. Art becomes a collaborative, open-ended inquiry into the fluxes between self and other, image and idea, being and becoming.
Carolina Paz is a Brazilian artist whose practice intersects language, poetic consciousness, and social transformation through painting, installation, text, video, and gestures of care. Founder of Uncool Artist and a board member at A.I.R. Gallery, she previously directed Coletivo 2e1 in São Paulo. Her work has been exhibited in Brazil, the United States, and Europe, is held in public and private collections, and has received the Funarte Visual Arts Prize. She holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and graduate degrees in Social Sciences and in Media and Knowledge.
imagining spaces is on view through November 16, 2025 at A.I.R. GALLERY, 155 Plymouth St., Brooklyn, New York, United States.
*Cover image: Carolina Paz, imagining spaces, 2025. Acrylic on 1200 1x1 inch wood cubes to be activated by visitors following artist's prompts, variable dimensions (installation). Courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.
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