Dalton Paula at Galeria Martins&Montero’s booth, SP-Arte 2025/Photo: Ivi BrasilWhile millions of reais are being spent among galleries, museums, collectors and sponsors at SP-Arte, there is a lot of art to see and ways to understand the paths that gallery owners and artists take in their eternal search for new things. The second floor of the Biennial building, where SP-Arte is held, brings together the main Brazilian galleries and some foreign ones. It is the ideal place to keep an eye on trends and see new works by big names in the world of visual arts.
Curator Baixo Ribeiro, founding partner of the Choque Cultural gallery, celebrates this year’s SP-Arte with an exhibition/intervention with posters outside the Biennial building. Not far from there, the façade of artist Alê Romão’s studio has been given the status of opening the largest art fair in the Americas. The exhibition is a collage of posters by artists not only from the gallery, but also from others who form a community that works together with Baixo Ribeiro on special projects. Last year, Choque Cultural celebrated twenty years of pioneering the introduction of urban art into the Brazilian market and also began research for the generative art festival called Pylon, which began in January. In the middle of the intersection of major avenues in the city’s South Zone, a twenty-five-meter-high (twenty-four-yard-high) totem pole was lined with LED panels to display generative videos, which are common on cell phones. “This is an initiative to bring together the entire community of the Choque Cultural gallery, which goes beyond the twelve artists represented. It is a first step towards highlighting this community with whom we work, which includes many people from the outskirts of the city and has a strong social impact,” says Ribeiro.
Denilson Baniwa at A Gentil Carioca gallery’s booth, SP-Arte 2025/Photo: Ivi BrasilAn unpublished work can remain in a drawer for many years and only come to light at the peak of the artist’s career. A series of four photographs by Dalton Paula, whose paintings are sought after by collectors and institutions, is on display at Galeria Martins&Montero‘s booth. The photos are from 2013, the year before the artist from the State of Goiás made his debut in the art market in São Paulo, at the hands of Maria Montero. The photographs are frames of performances by Dalton Paula and are part of an interesting collection, not shown at SP-Arte, which also includes videos and installations in which the artist questions race and religion, themes also found in his famous paintings, which are in the collections of MASP and the New Museum, New York, for example.
With the Amazon in the spotlight in the international press due to COP30 (Thirtieth United Nations Climate Change Conference), which will be held in Belém, on the banks of the mouth of the Amazon River, artists from the Brazilian North Region have been gaining more and more space in galleries and important art events, such as the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennial. And so too at SP-Arte, since the market has been profiting from artists from the Amazon and museums have been including Indigenous artists (many from the North of Brazil) in their collections. A large painting in neon colors and words in an Indigenous language is the work that draws the most attention at the A Gentil Carioca gallery’s booth. Denilson Baniwa’s painting “O canto do sabiá” (2024) depicts an Indigenous ceremony and shows how education and family are important to Indigenous peoples, and also reflects on the intersection between the cultures of these peoples and the European one.
Link Museu at Izabel Pinheiro’s booth, SP-Arte 2025/Photo: Ivi BrasilGallery owner Izabel Pinheiro, from the gallery that bears her name, immediately points to a large photo by artist Keila Sankofa, from Manaus, when presenting one of her highlights. In the middle of the forest, the artist appears in contrasting red clothing and beaded glasses in a frame from the performance “Os olhos de okotô—floresta” (2022). But the gallery owner says she is more surprised by the attention of some collectors to the paintings of Link Museu and Tito Terapia, emerging artists from the outskirts of São Paulo who go beyond street art, always associated with the suburbs. Among the surprises, she says with a smile, is that a work by Iaco Viana, an artist who comes from street art, was highly sought after by collectors and sold on the first day of the fair.
The dense forest landscapes with acidic shades of green and full of glazes and other techniques are the hallmark of the paintings of Fernando Lindote, one of the most prominent and interesting artists from the southern region of Brazil. One of Lindote’s luminous forests is on display at the Zilda Fraletti Gallery‘s booth, from Curitiba. Lindote achieved the feat of being the only artist to have two solo exhibitions at the prestigious Tomie Ohtake Institute, one of which was curated by art critic Paulo Herkenhoff.
Arts and communication have been in his life since he entered university in the mid-1980s. In journalism, he has always worked in the areas of culture and arts, both in print, TV and digital media. He was a fellow at Radio Nederland in the course of Educational Programme Production for TV, in The Netherlands. He was part of arts collectives and began studies on curatorship at the Curatorial Laboratory of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM-SP) and amended with the Master’s degree in Aesthetics and Art History at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). He has developed exhibitions in galleries and autonomous art spaces and promoted walks as aesthetic practices guided by public art and art spaces in São Paulo’s downtown. He is a contributing writer of Into.Gallery, an online and presential art gallery project in Berlin. In the past, Ivi wrote and edited for musical magazines, like Mixmag and DJ Mag, and still loves dancing techno and loves going to provocative art exhibitions.