Marina Perez Simão

Marina Perez Simão was born in 1980 in Vitória, Brazil, and lives and works in São Paulo. Her paintings, watercolors, and prints build large fields of layered, curving color that read as abstracted landscapes, evoking horizons, waves, and geological strata without depicting any single, fixed place.

Accounts of her early training vary in detail. One profile notes that she originally attended law school and took painting and ceramics classes on the side before art took over, after which she enrolled in art school in Paris. Her most consistently documented credentials, repeated across gallery materials, are a BFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA) and an MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle, also in Paris, though the exact years of these degrees are not publicly available. Some biographies additionally cite earlier fine-art study at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo and a master's degree in philosophy from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, but these details appear in fewer sources and are treated here with more caution.

Her exhibition history has expanded steadily since a 2016 solo show at the Embassy of Brazil in Rome, through solo presentations at Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo, Brussels, and Paris, and at Pace Gallery in East Hampton, London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. In 2025 she opened Tuning Fork at Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, described in the art press as her first major institutional exhibition in Brazil.

Critical and curatorial attention has centered on Simão's shift from figurative reference points toward a personal, semi-abstract landscape language built through layered, curved color fields. Her rapid move from São Paulo and Brussels gallery shows to a solo at Pace Gallery London in 2022 and a first major Brazilian institutional survey at Instituto Tomie Ohtake in 2025 has been read by galleries and museums as evidence of a fast-consolidating international reputation. Museum acquisitions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, and the Long Museum in Shanghai, point to broad institutional confidence in her work even as extended critical writing about her practice in major art journals remains comparatively limited to date.

Simão's auction market is small and recent, consistent with an artist whose secondary-market activity has only started to build over the past several years. The best-documented result is an untitled 2021 oil on canvas that sold for USD 178,300 at Bonhams Los Angeles on 14 September 2022, above its estimate. Market-tracking databases also report Phillips results as high as USD 279,400 and note maximum realized painting prices as high as USD 422,000, but the underlying lot, house, and sale date behind those figures are not fully documented, so they are noted here as unconfirmed rather than as a record. No competitive art prizes or awards appear in the available public record.

Simão's museum and gallery position is unusually strong for an artist whose auction history only really begins in the early 2020s, which means collectors should weigh her institutional support more heavily than any single sale result. With only a handful of public auction data points and no catalogue raisonne, provenance and direct verification through Pace Gallery or Mendes Wood DM matter more than they would for an artist with a longer trading history. Documented auction prices have mostly stayed under USD 200,000, though market databases point to some higher, less well-documented results, and the small number of sales means any new result, higher or lower, can move quickly against the existing record.