From her modular paintings to her multigenerational curatorial practice and deep interest in painting as backdrop to performance, Cardoso has always existed in a world in which thinking about painting – from Malevich to Koether – is close to the skin of lived experience and yet unexpectedly not separate from thinking about folding laundry, or living with children, or eating a sandwich. For this reason, her work – which I would characterize as both utopian and radical – is important, and even vital. Cardoso’s painting is an act of resistance to the capitalist mechanization of life that demands that we separate our actions into discrete spheres: the productive, the leisured, the domestic, the public. In the notable collapse of public-private distinctions that marks the early 2020s – Zoom calls, home offices, performative Tik-Tok videos of intimate makeup rituals, Cardoso’s leaky abstraction also speaks deeply to our time.
— Maika Pollack, in ANA CARDOSO’S LEAKY ABSTRACTION: PURE ABSTRACTION IN THE KITCHEN, 2023
Ana Cardoso, Texting Driving
Kunsthalle Freeport, The Bedroom
July 5th — August 7th, 2026
Opening July 4th, 6PM
images © Filipe Braga
TEXTING DRIVING continues a line of research that Ana Cardoso has developed over recent years, returning to a title that functions simultaneously as an action and a warning. But also a condition of contemporary life? It names a state in which attention is split – between thought and movement, the road ahead and imagination drifting elsewhere. The landscapes that emerge are as psychological as they are geographical.
I can not help but think of a dark sleepless night behind me, with the sun suddenly rising, casting long shadows behind the mountains. I keep driving, in awe of the intensity that unfolds around me, eyes hurting. I have made it through another night, maybe I am about to arrive and I need to share that with someone by text….
Is that the moment when the crash happened? Was I just dreaming?
“After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.” (J.G. Ballard)
In TEXTING DRIVING, the crash never quite arrives. Instead, everything remains suspended in the moment before impact, when imagination overtakes direction and the landscape begins to think itself.
The strange temporalities that precede a potential accident: drifting attention, involuntary memories, sudden associations, and fleeting desires. It is in these intervals that perception feels fragmented.
The exhibition unfolds within this fleeting condition. And rather than illustrating movement, it produces it. Pyramid-like paintings occupy the room as sculptural obstacles that suggest orientation while quietly recalling the possibility of impact. As Amy Sillman noted, painting is a form of thinking that advances through detours, revisions, and misrecognitions rather than linear progression. Ana’s works similarly refuse fixed viewpoints or resolved narratives. They propose instead a choreography of encounters, near misses, and deviations, where cruise, crush, and collision coexist within the same restless movement.
—Alisa Heil
Ana Cardoso: Double Slip
05.10 — 06.08, 2025
Opening Saturday May 10, 3—5 PM
Uptown Gallery / Maika Pollack
11 E 80th Street, New York, NY 10075
Uptown Gallery is proud to present a solo presentation by Ana Cardoso: Issued Guidelines (2025), a large-scale new painting, Double Slip (2023-2024), along with copies of her recent artist book Leaky Abstraction — 4 Color Edition (2024).
Gallery hours: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 12-5 pm and by appointment. Call or text 646 623 0596 for appointment.
Ana Cardoso, Issued Guidelines, 2025
Acrylic, oil, ink and pencil on different and/or sewn linen fabric and canvas
80 x 80 inches overall (13 panels)
Image ©João Neves
Leaky Abstraction Book Launch with Ana Cardoso and Maika Pollack
Leaky Abstraction – 4 Color Edition (2024)
with Ana Cardoso and Maika PollackThursday, May 8
7pm, Doors 6:30pmFree and open to all with limited seating. RSVP encouraged.
Leaky Abstraction — 4 Color Edition
Essays by João Pinharanda, Maika Pollack and William J. Simmons
Published by Ana Cardoso and Ana Baliza © ANAS, 2024
With the support of EDP Foundation
150 copies
images by João Neves
Ana Cardoso: Leaky Abstraction
MAAT, Lisbon
Curated by Joao Pinharanda
28.03 — 17.09.2023
Text by João Pinharanda
Ana Cardoso, Leaky Abstraction, MAAT, Lisbon, 2023
Images © Joao Neves
ANA CARDOSO: EMPATHETIC ANGLES
Essay by William J. Simmons
ANA CARDOSO’S LEAKY ABSTRACTION: PURE ABSTRACTION IN THE KITCHEN
Essay by Maika Pollack
Ana Cardoso, Terra-Triangular, 2022-2023 (film still)
Super 8 Film transferred to video; Music by Tim Pierson; 4 min 16 s
©Ana Cardoso
Nuno Centeno, Porto
13.05 — 10.06.2023
Nuno Centeno Gallery presents Ana Cardoso: Shared Cache, a display of recent paintings from her ongoing series of modular and re-arrangeable panels. This is her fifth exhibition with the gallery.
For the past decade, Cardoso has been questioning the limits of abstraction in painting, and exploring its object as one that is open and multiple. In her work, paintings are made in parts (shaped canvases), and assembled at some point, as if in blind dates. The status of the finished work and the assertion of painting as an ongoing process are brought forward by the artist, as well as her straightforward use of the medium’s materials: she uses and recycles unprimed cotton and linen fabrics that she paints, draws, cuts, sews, stretches and un-stretches, as a way of conveying a widely experimental practice — one that encapsulates matter to challenge it’s perception.
Shared Cache, as in a system’s processor, is about latency, potential and their shared economy.
Ana Cardoso: Your Payment Verification Code is 26QNFLU9
Renata Fabbri, Milan
24.01—18.03.2023
Less Form, More Painting:
Ana Cardoso’s “Your Payment Verification Code Is 26QNFLU9”
by Gea Politi
I had just finishing reading (again, possibly for the third time) John Berger’s Ways of Seeing when Ana Cardoso asked me to write a critical text for her show at Renata Fabbri, in Milan.
Ana is a dear friend, and I have been an admirer and supporter of her work since the late-2000s. I was beyond excited that she was going to show her latest body of work in my hometown.
Looking at images of the works she was going to present, I immediately thought of a sentence from the book I’d just finished reading:
We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.
This new body of work, at first glance, feels more performative than her earlier modular works, which also had a physical approach, but followed color schemes based more on the installation rather than any discrete painterly gesture.
In her new works, Ana’s physicality is more daring. She is not afraid to employ imagery and a more overt storytelling approach. Her work has shifted from
a subtle formalism to a more tangible conceptual approach. Less form, more painting.
Ana’s work is about unlocking complexity. When she was still spending most of her time in New York, there were times when I would visit her studio more than once within a few days. Each time her work would have developed further toward the “breaking of a code” (one of her earlier works was titled Code Break). She always connected the digital and the mathematical to her practice, exposing elaborate patterns throughout her modules. It was as if composition and color could impose their own necessary condition, in the same way that necessity and sufficiency are terms used to describe conditional or implicational relationships in logic and mathematics.
Ana’s titles have often conjured the intricacies of
the digital world. Since the mid-2010s until now, this association has suggested a connection between data compression and the canvas: painting as a form of database storage, the file’s contents informed by
its title. This relationship is further complicated by the unusual shapes in Cardoso’s new body of work. Form Reform (Atomic Abyss), one of the central works of this exhibition, employs a twisted, DNA-like form. The painting is still modular, but the gestural acrylic seems almost migratory, as if coming out of the front of the canvas and continuing on the back.
In 26QNFLU9, the word “flu” in the title evokes a form of virus (or not), which in turn reflects aspects of the actual painting: turquoise acrylic overlaying graphite, chaotically invading a composition compressed into a triangle-shaped canvas.
Path Finder dares a more pastel palette, and elements are placed as if the shape is turning a page. The work may indeed have to do with finding a path, as the title suggests.
Your Identity History Summary Request includes silhouettes of a pterosaur—the prehistoric winged lizard that Cardoso borrowed from her children’s collection. It is a more playful work, both in terms of subject matter and its colorful, stencil-enhanced narrative sequences.
As in Berger’s relational way of seeing, each of the paintings in this show changes according to its hanging; there is always another way to present these works, including playing with back and front.
Each of Cardoso’s modules easily stands on its own, but connected they reveal the workings of
an essential code embedded in painting’s three- dimensionality. Each module belongs to a different time—a composition in the making. It is the ultimate performative act in painting.
Ana Cardoso, Union Gaucha Productions (Karin Schneider, Nicolás Guagnini), Eileen Quinlan, Jorge Pinheiro, Igor Krenz, Józef Robakowski, Monika Sosnowska, Tomás Cunha Ferreira
Curated by Barbara Piwowarska
Galerias Municipais — Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon
19.02.2022 – 30.04.2022
Installation view of Footnote 15: A Prototype, with Jorge Pinheiro, Tomás Cunha Ferreira, Ana Cardoso
Ana Cardoso, Pendente (2022)
Installation view of Footnote 15: A Prototype, with Ana Cardoso, Jorge Pinheiro, and films by Union Gaucha Productions (Karin Schneider, Nicolás Guagnini), and Igor Krenz
Eileen Quinlan, Gravity Falls; We Don’t Talk; The Hollow; First Things First; Creeping Crystal (2022)
Installation view of Footnote 15: A Prototype, with Jorge Pinheiro, and film by Union Gaucha Productions (Karin Schneider, Nicolás Guagnini)
Film still from Phantom Limb (1998) by Union Gaucha Productions
Ana Cardoso, Participante (2022)
Installation view of Footnote 15: A Prototype, with Jorge Pinheiro, Tomás Cunha Ferreira, Monika Sosnowska, Ana Cardoso, and film by Józef Robakowski
Installation view of Footnote 15: A Prototype, with Ana Cardoso, Tomás Cunha Ferreira
Installation views ©João Neves
Pintura: Campo de Observação (Group Show)
ANA CARDOSO | ANA MANSO | ANTÓNIO NEVES NOBRE | BEATRIZ COELHO | LUÍSA JACINTO | MARIANA GOMES | MARTA SOARES | RITA FERREIRA | RUI HORTA PEREIRA | RUI NEIVA | SÉRGIO FERNANDES
Curated by João Pinharanda
Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon
06.18 — 09.04.2021
