We remember the way Rebecca Sharp

Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present We remember the way, a solo exhibition by Brazilian painter Rebecca Sharp, whose works dissolve boundaries between figure and ground to investigate energetics substratal to appearances. Sharp’s practice emerges from a unique synthesis of sensibilities and a contemplative discipline, underpinned by training in Buddhist philosophy, into paintings that operate as staged meditations. Contemplative rigor yields images that move between exuberance and stillness, channeling the pulse of the collective alongside inward poise. For the artist, “the work is as much about travelling in as diffusing through a wide lens.” Treating atmospheric space as both character and emotional terrain, Sharp notably explores what she calls “the love making between expansion and landing,” provoking a way of consuming her art through which these movements might be one and the same. 

Unfolding as an atmospheric drama, this newest body of work is influenced by Transcendental, Romantic, and Surrealist schools. Sharp’s layered applications of paint are at once dense and dissolving; dark clouds, luminous light, and the soft chromatic range of oceanic blues and grays play against one another while engaging with painterly ambiguity and indeterminate fields of signification. The exhibition takes its title from Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letter #4, a poem invoking collective memory and recognition – “We return with the seas, the tides…  gentle, insistent, we remember the way.” Like di Prima, Sharp conceives remembrance as an energetic continuum that extends beyond individual consciousness.  

Rebecca Sharp (b. 1976, São Paulo, Brazil) lives and works between Brazil and the United States.  

Solo exhibitions include I am a place, Martins & Montero, Brussels (2024); Terrestres, Sé Galeria, São Paulo (2023); A Thinning Veil, Hexton Gallery (Aspen, 2023); The Return of the Baroque, Akara Art, Mumbai (2023); Tools for the Wonder Land, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2021); Trago a Mensagem do Destino, Sé Galeria, São Paulo (2020).

Group exhibitions and fairs include SP – Arte, São Paulo, (2025) U-Haul Art Fair, U-Haul Gallery, New York (2025); Art Brussels, Brussels, 2024; Let Me Tell You a Story, Akara Contemporary, Mumbai ( 2023); Caixa de Pandora, Jorge Yunes Private Museum (KURA), São Paulo (2022); Frieze New York, New York (2022); ZONAMACO, Mexico City (2022); Liste Art Fair, Basel (2021); O Canto do Bode, Casa da Cultura de Comporta, Comporta (2021).