ABOUT

Branca Cuvier is a Portuguese painter based in Lisbon, working between painting, drawing and sculpture. Her practice has developed with consistency and autonomy over the last decade, establishing its own language through material tension and transformation.

Her work begins where language reaches its limits, circling a central question: what happens to the body when identity starts to come apart? Rather than resolving that tension, the work holds it. Figures emerge in states of distortion and instability, where form is simultaneously constructed and disturbed. Surfaces accumulate marks instead of erasing them, carrying the memory of their own making through layering, erasure and shifts in density.

Trained at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual in Lisbon and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, she draws from psychology and anthropology to investigate how internal states — vulnerability, identity, transformation — manifest in the body and become composition. Gesture becomes system; psychological presence becomes structure.

Her practice resonates with a lineage rooted in Portuguese artistic life, in which the body is engaged not as subject but as site of inquiry — where image-making becomes a way of inhabiting rather than representing.

After an earlier career as the founder of a contemporary design and jewellery brand, she transitioned fully into her studio practice. In 2020 she founded Jiboia Studio in Lisbon — her atelier and creative space, which opens twice yearly through public Open Studio events. Now in its eleventh edition, the open studio has become a recurring and evolving structure in Lisbon, creating direct contact between the work and its audience.

"I think of the grotesque as a form of care — for the parts of ourselves we were taught to smooth over. Authenticity lives there, not despite the distortion, but because of it."

Selected exhibitions Steinbeisser Project, Hamburg My Suitcase is My Oyster, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Secret's Dealer, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven Endogenous, Artroom, Lisbon Manopera, Espaço Cultural das Mercês, Lisbon

Artistic residency at Viúva Lamego, Lisbon.

Press Vogue · Elle · Prima · Observador · Fantastic Frank · Umbigo · Time Out · Público

Selected collectors Lucy McRae, Carminho, The Vintage Hotel & Spa, Hotel Memória Porto FLH, Lidija Kolovrat, Ricardo Preto, Hyena, Reabilita, Lioz, Fora Eyewear