Catarina Leitão is an artist. Her favored mediums are drawing, sculpture, installation and the book. Key to her work, the idea that human and nature exist in continuity, the notions and processes of assembly, adaptability and hybridity play a fundamental role in negotiating a discourse between the two and the three-dimensional, the artificial and the natural, the actions of assembling and disassembling, which is materialized by a sculptural language that makes use of installation, drawing and illustration.
Leitão has been exhibiting her artwork since 1992. Among the awards and residences bestowed to her, stand out the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, 2009, Center for Book Arts, 2007, Triangle Arts, 2006, Sharpe Foundation, 2004, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, 2003, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2001, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Luso-American Foundation.
Leitão has a PhD from Colégio das Artes da Universidade de Coimbra, 2022, an MFA from the Hunter College City University of New York (2000), and graduated in Painting at the FBAUL, Lisbon (1993). She has been teaching at Escola Superior de Arte e Design das Caldas da Rainha since 2011 and at Colégio das Artes da Universidade de Coimbra since 2024.
watercolor, acrylic and cut on paper, 28 x 39 cm
"Catarina Leitão's works highlight the fact that every landscape is humanized — regardless of the degree of technological intervention it has been subjected to, it is always defined by an external [human] awareness, which grants it the status of landscape"
watercolor, acrylic and cut on paper, 110 x 151 cm
watercolor, acrylic and cut on paper, 110 x 151 cm (detail)
"Catarina Leitão's works highlight the fact that every landscape is humanized — regardless of the degree of technological intervention it has been subjected to, it is always defined by an external [human] awareness, which grants it the status of landscape. Therefore, in a reality in which every landscape is artificial/ized, only a good balance between natural and human technological) factors will make it possible to overcome (in the context of our aesthetic fruition) the dichotomy between the Kantian abstract categorical beautiful — impossible (or unsustainable in the face of the world’s current deregulation — and all the moralizing and censoring positions that threaten the freedom of creation and thought.
To the observer, Catarina Leitão offers a system of transference between representation (in the strict graphic coding of the mountains and in the sculptural artificialization of the branches) and the real itself. Enjoying a landscape is a total experience that cannot be replaced neither by these works nor by any other painting or artwork. Notwithstanding, it is an experience that, much like these pieces by Catarina Leitão — which were born outside the classical classification of landscape — cannot be subject to moral considerations." João Pinharanda
Wood, vinil, plastic, concrete, acrylic ink and aerosol
200 x 67 x 65 cm
Naturfatura H, 2023
Wood, vinil, felter, fabric, plastic, concrete, acrylic ink and aerosol
180 x 130 x 40 cm
Acrylic ink and cut on paper
28 x 39 cm (41 x 51 cm framed)
Acrylic ink and cut on paper
28 x 39 cm (41 x 51 cm framed)
watercolor, acrylic and cut on paper, 28 x 39 cm
watercolor, acrylic and cut on paper, 28 x 39 cm
Watercolor, gouache and acrylic on paper
38 x 57 cm
Acrylic ink and gouache on Arches paper, 66 x 103 cm
Watercolor, gouache, acrylic ink and cut on paper
66 x 103 cm
wood, fabric, plastic, acrylic ink and aerosol, 212x35x35 cm
"The artist leaves us at the intersection of various paths: alternately shrouding and unshrouding this reality; seducing us with theme and form, frustrating us with the artificialization of the objects she creates, the artist allows the spectator to walk back the operations that originated her works. Enriched by Leitão’s work, we are encouraged to walk out the gallery and become, like her, active wayfarers in a total landscape — taking in the ephemerality and timelessness of its significance." João Pinharanda
Watercolor on paper, 33 x 33 cm
Watercolor on paper, 33 x 33 cm
