Tiago Carneiro da Cunha

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha (born 1973, São Paulo, Brazil) is a Brazilian artist who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. His multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, sculpture and ceramics, drawing on the visual languages of popular culture, comics, B movies, animation and Brazilian adventure stories and folklore. His work combines humor and grotesque imagery with an interest in the relationship between popular and established cultural forms, often creating hybrid figures and fantastical situations that move between the comic, the disturbing and the absurd. Carneiro da Cunha began his artistic career through drawing and comics, with his work published in the Brazilian underground magazine Animal when he was seventeen, before developing a broader practice that has made sculpture and painting central to his work. His sculptures frequently use ceramics and other materials to create distorted, character-like forms that recall fairy tales, comic books and childhood objects while introducing darker associations. SFMOMA, which presented his work in the 2011 exhibition *New Work: Tiago Carneiro da Cunha and Klara Kristalova*, described his sculptures as deliberately imperfect and childlike in appearance, while emphasizing the more troubling subjects beneath their playful surfaces. His practice brings together humor, violence, sexuality and satire, while his use of forms associated with popular and commercial culture creates a deliberate tension between high and low cultural references. Painting has become increasingly prominent in his recent practice. In *Maldita Comédia* (2023), presented at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in São Paulo, five large-scale paintings depicted cosmic encounters between natural forces and hybrid, monstrous beings. Carneiro da Cunha placed his characters and action toward the edges of the compositions, leaving the central areas open to nebulae, beams of light and vortices of energy. The works combine thick oil-paint impasto, whose accumulated materiality recalls his sculptural practice, with imagery drawn from B movies, comics and video games. The resulting scenes are simultaneously parodic and mythological, using exaggerated characters and supernatural events to create a deliberately unstable space between epic narrative and comic absurdity. His recent exhibitions include *Férias para Sempre* at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel | Carpintaria in Rio de Janeiro (2026), *Maldita Comédia* in São Paulo (2023), *Green Galaxy* at Misako & Rosen in Tokyo (2022), *Zona Crepúsculo* in São Paulo (2019) and *Trânsito dos infernos* in São Paulo (2016). His work has also been presented in group exhibitions including *Terraphilia: Beyond the Human in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections* at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid (2025), *Estado Bruto* at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2021), and *Gravedad y Orbita* at Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (2020). Carneiro da Cunha studied visual arts at Parsons School of Design in New York and later pursued postgraduate studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he was an associate research student in the MFA program. In the mid-1990s he moved to Barcelona and was involved with the XXX collective, presenting performances in Spain and Portugal; the project received the KRTU Prize for Young Creativity from the Department of Culture of Catalonia in 1995. He subsequently returned to Brazil, where his practice has continued to move fluidly between sculpture, painting and other forms of visual production. In 2009 he was a resident at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His work is represented in public collections including the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Museu de Arte do Rio, Saatchi Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Arizona State University Art Museum and TBA21–Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. SFMOMA holds his ceramic sculpture *Ubu* (2011), while the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro holds *Bandido preto e rosa* (2006). Across these different bodies of work, Carneiro da Cunha maintains a distinctive language in which humor, grotesque figuration, material experimentation and popular imagery are used to construct fantastical worlds that remain closely connected to the social and cultural realities from which they emerge.