Emerging painter from Ceará, Northeastern Brazil.
Last year, I visited Alice Dote in her studio in Fortaleza, Brazil, and watched with fascination at the explosion of press, energy and events that exploded when her first institutional solo exhibition launched in October 2025 at the Centro Cultural Banco do Nordeste.
Alice’s work is courageous and audacious, using an autobiographical lens to explore sensuality, libido and hunger from a female perspective. Her work explores the often melancholy and transience of desire (s), and has an original engagement with Freud’s theory of Eros and Thanatos (desire vs destruction) and the dynamic, creative force that arises when these two forces continue their eternal push-and-pull in every human heart. She investigates the fields of eroticism and sexuality, memory and grief, which converge in an interest in intimacy of images, including cell phone images of intimate encounters or their immediate aftermath. Her research operates within the tension of a sexual politics of the gaze, in the proposition of eroticism as a procedure, and in the transductions between the intimate and the public.
For such a young artist, Alice uses oil paint with a skill, hunger and sensuality that bodes well for her future development. At a time when north-eastern Brazil (historically ignored and underestimated within Brazil itself) is becoming a major economic and cultural force, as well as the aesthetics of Latin America receiving unprecedented attention worldwide, this feels the perfect time for the works of Alice Dote to make their debut in an international context.