ABOUT
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Maria Gomes (b. 2001) is a Portuguese artist, currently based in London, working between painting and sculpture.
Gomes graduated from the MA Painting course at the Royal College of Art, London (UK), in 2025, where she was awarded the Ali H Alkazzi Scholarship. She previously studied at Chelsea College of Arts, graduating in 2022. Gomes has exhibited in London and internationally.
Gomes explores perception, spatiality, and the gaze - framing painting as a site of encounter in which both subject and viewer become mutually aware. By placing suggestive, amorphous forms within highly organised environments, she evokes the performativity often associated with the experience of womanhood. These forms are made to perform repeatedly for and in front of one another, a dynamic that extends into the relationship between her paintings and sculptures. Through this interplay, the gaze is redistributed multilaterally — moving across viewers and objects without hierarchy or fixed orientation. Her work reflects the anxieties of contemporary life and creative practices, while critically interrogating the complexities of self-presentation.
Gomes’ work inaugurates an alternate, liminal zone — a space stripped of conventional sensory cues, where logic is governed not by speech or sight, but by touch, vibration, and gesture.
These ambiguous environments resist clear temporality, existing as much in the past as in the future. Within her compositions, beings interact in a field of contact. They appear to organise and respond to their environment, yet they lack eyes, mouths, and ears. Instead, their mode of communication seems closer to that of plants or natural systems, perhaps operating through sonar, vibration, or un- seen wavelengths. These beings might inhabit a time before or beyond the human - a pre-human or post-human reality - where chronology collapses and presence is not anchored to the contemporary. There are no direct references to time or place, no markers of modern life. This absence is deliberate: a way of constructing a world that avoids self-referentiality or obvious metaphor. Gomes imagines a space where affect and relation can be portrayed obliquely rather than illustratively.
More recently Gomes pulls the beings in her paintings into physical space, creating a portal between these spaces and linking their existences to the viewer’s. She brings her painted beings into physical space through carved wood — a material she connects with deeply, having grown up surrounded by it in rural Portugal.
The artist’s practice becomes a site of shifting identities and ongoing critique - a dialogue across mediums and generations. Rooted in self exploration, yet expansive and open-ended, moving fluidly between sculpture, relief, and painting.
Maria Gomes (b. 2001) is a Portuguese artist, currently based in London, working between painting and sculpture.
Gomes graduated from the MA Painting course at the Royal College of Art, London (UK), in 2025, where she was awarded the Ali H Alkazzi Scholarship. She previously studied at Chelsea College of Arts, graduating in 2022. Gomes has exhibited in London and internationally.
Gomes explores perception, spatiality, and the gaze - framing painting as a site of encounter in which both subject and viewer become mutually aware. By placing suggestive, amorphous forms within highly organised environments, she evokes the performativity often associated with the experience of womanhood. These forms are made to perform repeatedly for and in front of one another, a dynamic that extends into the relationship between her paintings and sculptures. Through this interplay, the gaze is redistributed multilaterally — moving across viewers and objects without hierarchy or fixed orientation. Her work reflects the anxieties of contemporary life and creative practices, while critically interrogating the complexities of self-presentation.
Gomes’ work inaugurates an alternate, liminal zone — a space stripped of conventional sensory cues, where logic is governed not by speech or sight, but by touch, vibration, and gesture.
These ambiguous environments resist clear temporality, existing as much in the past as in the future. Within her compositions, beings interact in a field of contact. They appear to organise and respond to their environment, yet they lack eyes, mouths, and ears. Instead, their mode of communication seems closer to that of plants or natural systems, perhaps operating through sonar, vibration, or un- seen wavelengths. These beings might inhabit a time before or beyond the human - a pre-human or post-human reality - where chronology collapses and presence is not anchored to the contemporary. There are no direct references to time or place, no markers of modern life. This absence is deliberate: a way of constructing a world that avoids self-referentiality or obvious metaphor. Gomes imagines a space where affect and relation can be portrayed obliquely rather than illustratively.
More recently Gomes pulls the beings in her paintings into physical space, creating a portal between these spaces and linking their existences to the viewer’s. She brings her painted beings into physical space through carved wood — a material she connects with deeply, having grown up surrounded by it in rural Portugal.
The artist’s practice becomes a site of shifting identities and ongoing critique - a dialogue across mediums and generations. Rooted in self exploration, yet expansive and open-ended, moving fluidly between sculpture, relief, and painting.