Overview
Fabio Almeida was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1968 and settled in the UK in the early 1990's where he studied painting at the City Lit Institute and Communication Art & Design at the Royal College of Arts in London.
His recent work draws on the legacy of the Modernist movement so prevalent in his native South America during the immediate post war period. The aesthetics and vision of architects and designers such as Oscar Niemeyer, Lina Bo Bardi, Roberto Burle Marx to name a few, form the building blocks of Almeida's visual language. His work is laced with a layer of realism and current preoccupations of present day, especially those related to life in large urban areas. 

Almeida's large scale abstract collages, created using hand painted papers, varnish and markers offer playful compositions referencing design and architecture, but the materiality and texture of the surfaces remind us of more mundane aspects of urban life: rough walls, pavements, digital glitches, even pollution.

It is in the tension between the pleasing aesthetics of the compositions and the physicality of the layered surfaces that Almeida's paintings come to life.

updated August 2021 (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
Works
Exhibitions