alice dote
about
Alice Dote (b. 1992, Fortaleza, Ceará) is a Brazilian visual artist and researcher living and working in Fortaleza. Her practice spans oil painting, drawing, printmaking and writing, developing an autobiographically rooted figurative language around intimacy, eroticism, desire, sexuality, memory and mourning.
Working frequently from photographs made within intimate relationships, Dote investigates the sexual politics of looking and the possibilities of a woman occupying the position of desiring subject before another body. Male nudes, traces of encounters and still lifes speak of something after it has been touched.
In her research, intimacy operates as a method and eroticism as a procedure, shaping not only what is represented but also the ways an image is looked at, touched, repeated and transformed. Photographs return through painting, drawing and printmaking, while writing becomes another way of producing and displacing images.
In 2025–2026, Dote presented her first institutional solo exhibition, the name of this is not hunger [o nome disso não é fome], curated by Eduardo Bruno and Waldírio Castro at Banco do Nordeste Cultural Fortaleza. In 2026, she published her first monograph, Alice Dote, with Barléu Editora, bringing together approximately 60 works and a critical essay by Paula Plee, and presented the solo exhibition What I Painted When I Gave Up Painting at Rato — Laboratório Experimental de Arte Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro.
In 2026, Dote was invited to inaugurate CONSTELAR, an international artist residency programme in London led by curator and gallerist Florence Woodfield Morais, co-founder of Astéri Contemporary, and dedicated to fostering exchanges between Ceará and the United Kingdom. During the residency, she further develops her research into painting, intimacy, desire and images of masculinity, culminating in a public presentation of the work and participation in Paraíso, the first UK art fair dedicated to Latin American art.
Dote holds an MA in Sociology from the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), where she conducted research in urban anthropology on walking, writing, images and the experience of the city in central Fortaleza. Since 2017, she has also developed Narrativas Possíveis, a project exploring relationships between art and the city. Her trajectory includes the PRIS Residency and Exchange Programme at Hub Cultural Porto Dragão (2025), a period of artistic research and training in Barcelona (2024), and programmes at institutions including Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Ateliê Piratininga.
Her work has been presented in exhibitions and projects in Fortaleza, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, among other contexts, and forms part of a broader practice spanning research, teaching, writing and collaboration.
Alice Dote is represented in the UK and Europe by Astéri Contemporary, London.
Tiago Lopes, 2026
Tiago Lopes, 2026
My work begins in intimacy
I paint, draw, make prints and write from images that emerge from lived experience: bodies I have desired, photographs made within relationships, domestic spaces, objects left behind, gestures, fragments and traces of encounters. I think of them as images of intimacy — not necessarily because intimacy is what they depict, but because it is the place from which I approach them.
I am interested in intimacy as a method and eroticism as a procedure. Desire determines distance: how close I get to an image, how long I sustain my gaze upon it, what I reveal, what I withhold, and what happens through the physical act of making. Painting, for me, involves a body-to-body encounter. I move towards and away from it; I touch, cover and uncover its surface; I repeat gestures and look again. Eroticism therefore enters the work not only through what is represented, but through the negotiation between my body and the body of the painting.
Tiago Lopes, 2026
A central question in my practice concerns the sexual politics of looking: what happens when a woman sustains a desiring gaze upon the male body? The men I paint frequently appear in states of intimacy, rest, exposure and vulnerability rather than performing strength or offering themselves as heroic images. I am interested in what becomes visible when masculinity is encountered from this position — and in how desire can produce images without simply reproducing the violence historically embedded in looking.
Photography is embedded in this process. Many paintings begin with photographs made on a phone and retain the 16:9 proportions of the digital screen. But an image rarely ends where it began. I return obsessively to the same photographs: they may become paintings, drawings or prints, or return through words. Repetition is not an attempt to arrive at a definitive version. Each passage displaces the image.
Writing belongs to this movement. Titles, notes, fragments and longer texts do not explain the images; they approach them from another distance. I have become increasingly interested in writing as a way of looking, and in producing images through words.
Drawing has a different temporality. While my oil paintings require prolonged encounters with their surfaces, drawings often happen quickly, almost like notes. I make them in notebooks and on loose sheets that accumulate on studio walls. They are works in themselves, but also belong to the same field of thought as the paintings: an image can move between drawing, printmaking, painting and writing without any of these forms becoming its final destination.
Tiago Lopes, 2026
This circulation between images, materials and surfaces also shapes the way I understand research. A notebook, a studio wall, a painting, a text, a correspondence or a webpage can become different surfaces on which things are gathered, repeated, displaced and rearranged. I am interested in what happens when the way a process is recorded also becomes a way of constructing it — when research is not simply documented but continuously remade through montage.
My background in Sociology and urban anthropology has shaped this way of working. Before these questions became central to my studio practice, I was already thinking through walking, images, writing, fragments and montage in my research on the city. I continue to understand making as a way of producing knowledge: by looking, approaching, arranging things beside one another and allowing unexpected relations to emerge.
Perhaps this is why I find it difficult to separate artistic practice from life. Images come from living, but making them changes the way I return to life. Painting leads me back to photographs, photographs to bodies, bodies to words, words to other images.
The work continues through this hunger of seeing the world through the mouth.
