Marcela Gontijo (b. 1966, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is a contemporary Brazilian artist based in Brasília. She graduated in Fine Arts from the Universidade de Brasília, where she has lived and worked since early in her career. Her practice moves fluidly across painting, photography, installation, and performance, resisting fixed categorization while maintaining a rigorous and cohesive conceptual framework.Gontijo’s work is grounded in the intersection of image-making and spatial perception. Her paintings often originate from photographic fragments and processes of experimental collage, drawing from the visual language of the urban environment—its surfaces, rhythms, and layered material traces. Through a sustained process of collecting and reconfiguring images, objects, and found materials, she constructs complex visual systems that oscillate between abstraction and documentation.At the core of her practice is a continuous investigation of space as structure and flow. Organized through grid-like and rhizomatic logics, her compositions extend beyond traditional pictorial boundaries, where lines and forms appear to exceed the edges of the canvas and enter the surrounding environment. In doing so, her work dissolves the distinction between image and space, positioning painting as an expanded field that actively engages with the world it inhabits.