DIRECTORY 2026

Marta Nunes | Painting

Marta Ornelas Monteiro is a Lisbon-born artist and former architect whose practice grows from an intimate dialogue with the natural world. Her work emerges from travels across diverse landscapes, collecting textures, memories, and organic elements that she transforms into sculptural and mixed-media compositions. Guided by the idea that life unfolds in layers of body, memory, and nature, she explores how these strata shape our personal and collective stories.

Working with found natural materials, Marta gives new life to fragments of earth, wood, and foliage, creating poetic forms that evoke resilience, transformation, and a sense of belonging. Her approach blends artistic intuition with an architectural sensibility, designing with nature as both collaborator and source of meaning.

Her latest work, Layers of Life, Layers of Body, Layers of Nature’s Reality, explores the unseen strata of existence. In this body of work, nature is both subject and medium. Using earth's textures as a canvas, she reveals the hidden narratives embedded in time: the rings of a tree, the folds of skin, the sediment of memory. The work speaks to the interconnectedness of all life, inviting viewers to consider how their own layers, physical, emotional, and spiritual, are mirrored in the natural world.

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