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 and transform bodies and nature. Working with living microorganisms, body fluids, and ephemeral materials, her work reveals the instability of matter and its ongoing processes of expansion, decay, and regeneration.
The body is central to her practice, appearing through actions or traces that evoke presence and absence. Her work investigates the porous boundaries between the human and non-human, the biological and symbolic, the internal and external, the visible and the latent, often dialoguing with a restlessness—a fascination with what constitutes us, and at the same time, a repulsion.
The artist has cultivated microorganisms from cemetery soils, public parks, and her own body, creating installations and a video installation that reflect on symbiosis, interdependence, and the entanglements among all life forms. She developed the series Para Ti, O Universo / For You, The Universe (2023–2024), composed of paintings created with blood, confronting grief and loss while reclaiming the body as a site of experience and creation. The series also evolved into six artist books, each featuring fine art prints, arranged in a box set. In her video Linfa (2017), organic matter is expelled from the mouth into the water, where it expands, evoking a pulse of life in a movement of transformation and dissolution.
Mayer’s practice is a meditation on cycles of death and rebirth, revealing forces that often remain unseen. Her work seeks to materialize 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.
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.
In Berlin, she carried out public interventions, including the display window of the GlogauAIR artist residency (2018), site-specific installations at Tiergarten Park (2020) and UdK’s Konzertsaal (2022). In São Paulo, she was invited to create an installation for the garden of Parque da Água Branca as part of CASACOR São Paulo (2025).
Her exhibitions include the BIENALSUR (San Juan and Rosario, Argentina, 2025), the International Biennial of Curitiba (Brazil, 2021), Instituto Guimarães Rosa (Asunción, Paraguay, 2025), and CASACOR São Paulo (Brazil, 2025). Other notable exhibitions include Klosterfelde Edition (Berlin, Germany, 2023), Kühlhaus Berlin (2022), Floating University (Berlin, 2021), 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). Her work is part of the collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Asunción (Paraguay) and the Enter Art Foundation Collection (Berlin, Germany).