João Castilho Lives and works in Belo Horizonte (Brazil), b. 1978

João Castilho, 1978, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil.

Lives and works in Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil.

João Castilho works with photography in an expanded field. The ‘photographic’, at the base of his artistic thought, takes the form of series, photo installations, collages, videos and sculptures. Thinking about the Earth in its multiplicity, disorganizing scales and mixing temporalities, has been the common engine of all his production. Building quasi-fiction works, João Castilho creates ways of aesthetically representing our belonging to the world. To conceive a geology of color, the artist pursues similar shades from different perspectives. He creates blocks of intensity by operating the explosion and implosion of the photographic frame, decomposing and recomposing the strata of the images and making cosmopolitical alliances radiate from his compositions.

João is a PHd student and master in Visual Arts at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. He held individual exhibitions at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Fundação Joaquim Nabuco and in cultural centers and art galleries. He participated in important group exhibitions such as Entre Nós, Pivô (2023), New Acquisitions, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (2019), Arte, Democracia, Utopia, Museu de Arte do Rio (2018), 10th Mercosul Biennial (2015), 19th Videobrasil Contemporary Art Festival ( 2015), 8th International Biennial of Curitiba (2013), Elóge du Vertige, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2012); Mythologies, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (2012) and 5th Biennale de la Photographie et des Arts Visuel de Liège (2010). He won the Photography Scholarship, Instituto Moreira Salles / Zum Magazine, the Funarte Contemporary Art Prize, the Marc Ferrez Photography Prize, the Conrado Wessel Foundation Art Prize, among others. He published the photobooks Zoo (2017), Tropical Hotel (2013), Escopic Pulsion (2012), Dead Weight (2010) and Submerged Landscape (Cosad Naify, 2008). His works are in important public and private collections such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Musée du Quai Branly, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Museum of Art of São Paulo, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Museum of Photography in Fortaleza, National Museum of Fine Arts, Rio Art Museum, Pampulha Museum, Mineiro Museum, Itaú Collection and Instituto Moreira Salles.