BRUNA MAYER
(Curitiba, Brazil, 1986)
ARTISTIC PRACTICE
Visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans video, installation, painting, public intervention, and photography. Her work explores the thresholds between life and death, the transience of existence, and the vital forces that shape all beings.
Working with living microorganisms and ephemeral organic elements—such as body fluids, water, agar, and other substances—Mayer embraces a process-based approach that exposes the instability of materials and their continuous transformation within natural cycles as they shift, expand, and decay.
The body is central to her practice, serving as a site of documentation and experimentation. It manifests through actions or as a vestige, leaving material residues and lingering imprints that evoke both presence and absence. Her work explores the body's extensions—shifting from the biological to the symbolic, from the psychic to the emotional—probing the boundaries between the internal and external, the visible and the latent, the intimate and the collective.
The confrontation between the body and organic, porous matter in her artistic process—whether direct or indirect—creates a tension between attraction and aversion, intrinsic to our condition yet often provoking discomfort or unease.
In recent years, Mayer has expanded her research on microorganisms, cultivating colonies of fungi and bacteria to reflect on symbiosis, resilience, and interdependence. Her practice crosses and transcends the boundaries between human and non-human, nature and culture, the biological and the symbolic, unveiling the entanglements among all life forms. Parallel to this, she has developed a series of paintings created with blood, confronting grief and loss while reclaiming the body as a site of experience and creation.
Mayer’s practice is a meditation on cycles of death and rebirth, revealing forces that often remain unseen. Her work materializes underlying aspects of existence that might have been neglected or set aside due to their unsettling nature but that, when repressed, grow stronger, infiltrating and expanding beneath the surface. In doing so, she engages with subtle phenomena that penetrate and permeate both the body and nature.
BIO | EXHIBITIONS | EDUCATION
BRUNA MAYER (Curitiba, Brazil, 1986) holds a Master of Arts degree from the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK, 2022) and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo (2015). She was awarded a scholarship from the Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, USA, 2009), where she studied Illustration.
During her artist residency at GlogauAIR (2018), she developed an intervention in a display case facing the public space. In Berlin, she also created temporary interventions at Tiergarten Park (2020) and at UdK's Konzertsaal (2022).
During her artist residency at GlogauAIR (2018), she developed an intervention in a display case facing the public space. In Berlin, she also created temporary interventions at Tiergarten Park (2020) and at UdK's Konzertsaal (2022).
Her recent exhibitions include the International Biennial of Curitiba (Brazil, 2021), Klosterfelde Edition (Berlin, Germany, 2023), Kühlhaus Berlin (Berlin, Germany, 2022), and Floating University (Berlin, Germany, 2021). Other notable exhibitions include Caroço (São Paulo, Brazil, 2024), De School (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2020), GlogauAIR Gallery (Berlin, Germany, 2018), and Bunker 101 (Cologne, Germany, 2018), among others. She was also awarded Best Short Film at the Los Angeles Brazilian Film Festival (Los Angeles, USA, 2015).