Art by Ione Saldanha

Saldanha began as a figurative painter of Brazilian urban facades before moving toward geometric abstraction, and eventually toward the work she's best known for: her "Bambus" series, dried bamboo stalks painted in bands of saturated color and displayed as freestanding sculptural objects, blurring the line between painting and sculpture entirely. She was included in the main exhibition of the 2024 Venice Biennale, "Foreigners Everywhere," curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and has been the subject of a major retrospective at São Paulo's MASP. Her work sits at an unusual crossing point in Brazilian modernism, formally rigorous but made from the humblest, most literal material she could find.