Marina Perez Simão

On View
Nov 4, 2025 – Feb 11, 2026
Tokyo

Pace is pleased to present coinciding exhibitions of work by artists Marina Perez Simão and Tomie Ohtake in Tokyo this fall. On view November 4, 2025, through February 11, 2026, these presentations, installed across the first and second floors of Pace’s Azabudai Hills gallery, will situate new paintings by Simão in dialogue with works produced by Ohtake—a Japanese-Brazilian artist whose inventive abstractions charted new courses for Modernism in Brazil—between 1963 and 2013. Both exhibitions will be on view during Art Week Tokyo 2025, which runs from November 5 to 9.

For her debut solo exhibition in Japan, Simão—a Brazilian artist renowned for her work in oil painting, watercolor, and printmaking—will unveil a new series of landscape-inspired pieces. Her vibrant, lyrical compositions blur the lines between interior and exterior worlds, guiding viewers through semi-abstract realms filled with organic, flowing forms. Her work reflects a deep engagement with emotion, memory, and place, rendered through a distinctly personal visual language. As part of her process, Simão begins with drawing and watercolor, forging her compositions on canvas after her initial iterations of ideas and forms in these other mediums. Citing Ohtake as a key influence on her practice, she is presenting a solo exhibition at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo through October 19.

The paintings that Simão will show at Pace Tokyo speak to her deep and enduring interest in abstraction’s power to convey ideas, concepts, and feelings that transcend language. With these canvases created in 2024 and 2025, the artist has experimented with vertical and horizontal formats to propose new ways of reading space. Defying conventions of landscape painting, she often incorporates multiple horizons in her otherworldly, atmospheric compositions.

Simão’s new works are chromatically linked by her use of indigo—an ode to the centuries-old tradition of indigo production in Japan—as well as shades of red and pink. Always unfolding her practice in different directions with each body of work, she has also imbued these dynamic paintings, through palette and gesture, with cosmic luminosity and rhythmic motion. Rendered at multiple scales, Simão’s latest compositions are rife with mystery, and they propose new ways of viewing and experiencing landscape.

Together, these exhibitions of work by Simão and Ohtake will present an intergenerational conversation between two artists linked by their heritage and their imaginative approaches to abstraction and landscape painting.

Films

Artists on Artists: Marina Perez Simão x Tomie Ohtake

This film from our Artists on Artists series accompanies our coinciding exhibitions of work by Marina Perez Simão and Tomie Ohtake at our Tokyo gallery. Simão, who is presenting her landscape paintings in dialogue with Ohtake's work in Tokyo, speaks about the late Japanese-Brazilian artist's life and legacy. "I love the ambiguity of forms and the vastness of possibilities," Simão says of Ohtake's paintings and sculptures. "There's a mixture of rigor and playfulness."

Portrait of Marina Perez Simão by Mauro Restiffe — Photography by Mauro Restiffe

About the Artist

Marina Perez Simão lives and works in São Paulo. She received a BFA from École Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts de Paris (ENSBA) and an MFA from École Nationale Superieure de Creation Industrielle, Paris. Important solo exhibitions of her work include Marina Perez Simão, Villa Era, Vigliano Biellese, Italy (2023); Marina Perez Simão: Solanaceae, Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Marina Perez Simão: ZWIELICHT, G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany (2024–25); Marina Perez Simão: Diffusion, Mendes Wood DM, Paris (2024); Marina Perez Simão: Echoes, Cahiers d'Art, Paris (2025); and Marina Perez Simão: Diapasão, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2025). Simão’s work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, China; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, France; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; and the Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh, among others.

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