Ana Coutinho

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ana Coutinho is a Brazilian visual artist whose practice explores the intersections of abstract painting, spatiality, sound, and temporality. She holds an MA in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins, London, and a BA in Visual Communication from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She has furthered her studies in visual arts through independent programs and specializations at institutions including Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, the São Paulo School of Fine Arts, and the School of Visual Arts.

Working primarily through painting while expanding into installation and site-responsive environments, Coutinho investigates non-verbal forms of perception through color, rhythm, gesture, and material presence. Her work emerges from an expanded mode of listening, where painting becomes a field for translating intangible phenomena—such as sound, memory, duration, and atmosphere—into visual and spatial experience. Through layered compositions and immersive environments, she constructs sensory landscapes that invite viewers into states of contemplation, attention, and embodied awareness.

In 2025, she became the first visual artist in residence at the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra, developing Spiral Movements, an installation conceived in dialogue with Symphony No. 7, presented at Cidade das Artes and curated by Keyna Eleison. The project expanded her ongoing research into the intersections of visual composition, musical structure, spatiality, and temporal perception, exploring how sound can be translated into immersive visual environments and embodied experiences.

Also in 2025, she undertook an artist residency and presented the exhibition Sonoridades – Lower East Side at Visionary Projects, in New York, where urban soundscapes, mapped trajectories, and experiences of movement through the city were transformed into painterly matter and spatial installations.

Recent exhibitions include Vasos Condutores do Tempo (Rio de Janeiro, 2024), curated by Keyna Eleison; Reimagined Realities (Barcelona, 2023); and Signs Point to Yes (Lisbon, 2023).

With an international trajectory spanning more than a decade, Coutinho lived and worked across São Paulo, New York, and London, navigating the fields of contemporary art, fashion, and design. During this period, she collaborated with fashion designer Alexander McQueen, an experience that contributed to the development of an interdisciplinary approach to image-making, materiality, and spatial thinking. Since 2020, she has been based in Rio de Janeiro, where she works exclusively as a visual artist.

Work