São Paulo, Brazil, 1974 \ lives and works in São Paulo
In her artistic practice, Maria explores the relationships between her occupations, that of artist and gallery owner. Her works address questions of both a poetic and prosaic order: basic questions of survival and performance in the field of art. Through objects, drawings, installations, videos, and appropriations, Maria Montero proposes a space for metalanguage, leaning over her own art to make it. What moves her practice are the artists she represents as a gallery owner, the afflictions of the market, classes, notes, observations, and the possibilities of producing fiction and frictions from a conceptual activity.
Founder of the experimental space of artistic residency Phosphorus (2011-2014), in a property located on the first street of São Paulo, Maria founded in 2014, in the same location, Sé Galeria, an artist-run gallery formed by a team of artists with a solid trajectory artistic and academic and that, for the most part, entered the art market through the gallery. In her work as a gallery owner, she seeks to monitor the artists she represents, proposing exhibition projects that favor critical, conceptual, and experimental thinking. It is through the intimacy with the artists and their works that she outlines the contours of her performance.
Maria studied Art Psychotherapy at Goldsmiths College, London (1998), and graduated (2020) in Art: History, Criticism, and Curatorship from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).
In 2017, she held the solo show “Survivência dos Vagalumes” at Sé Galeria and in 2018 she participated in the group exhibition “Women at the Collection of the Sea”. In 2019, he performed the solo show “8 Movements” at the Simon Preston Gallery, in New York.
