The Closer You Look, the Farther It Recedes
 
Marina Rheingantz’s 《Míope》 is on view at White Cube Seoul through October 24. Marking the Brazilian artist’s first solo exhibition in Korea, the show brings together new works produced over the past year in her São Paulo studio.
 
The title 《Míope》 means “myopic” in Portuguese. As the title suggests, the exhibition explores how images shift between near and far vision. For Rheingantz, landscape is not a fixed scene but an image in constant transformation, shaped by distance, memory, and the materiality of paint.

An Unstable Gaze and a Shifting Landscape
 
Rheingantz’s landscapes do not point clearly to a specific place or moment in time. Memories of the Brazilian countryside, photographs she has accumulated, and visual references drawn from painting and textiles overlap to form fluid, shifting pictorial spaces.
 
Observed scenes, remembered images, and sensory impressions of nature are layered together, allowing her landscapes to move beyond the representation of any single, identifiable place.

The title work, Míope (2026), most directly embodies this approach. Forms suggestive of vegetation or terrain sharpen and dissolve across the surface, while some overlap to create the impression of double or even triple vision. With no stable horizon or fixed vanishing point, viewers are repeatedly prompted to reconsider scale and distance.
 
 
 
Images That Dissolve as You Move Closer
 
What matters in Rheingantz’s painting is not the precise identification of what is being seen. Rather, the work foregrounds how unstable and conditional the act of seeing can be.
 
From a distance, the image may read as a coherent landscape. Up close, however, it breaks apart into brushstrokes, stains, layers of paint, and traces of gesture. Moving closer does not necessarily provide more information; instead, it can mean losing sight of the image as a whole.
 
Her paintings are built through repeated processes of construction and erasure. Paint is layered and removed, diluted pigment is allowed to run, and material accumulates across the surface. The result is less a flat representation of landscape than a terrain in itself—one shaped by erosion and sedimentation, formation and disappearance.

Between Figuration and Abstraction
 
In Bromélia Caranguejo, branch-like forms appear to occupy the foreground, yet the green and off-white planes behind them do not recede according to conventional perspective.
 
In smaller works such as Periquita, Caracol, and Taturana, thick paint, stains, and oil-stick marks create surfaces reminiscent of aged frescoes or peeling wallpaper.
 
Although the titles retain specific references to Brazilian flora and fauna, the images themselves remain suspended between figuration and abstraction.
 
This approach makes clear that Rheingantz is not attempting to reproduce a particular site. For her, landscape is an image that continues to change through the acts of seeing, remembering, forgetting, and looking again.

About the Artist
 
Marina Rheingantz was born in Araraquara, Brazil, in 1983 and is currently based in São Paulo. Drawing on memories of Brazil’s natural and rural environments, she has developed a practice spanning painting and textile works, expanding the traditional genre of landscape into questions of memory, materiality, and perception.
 
Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at ICA Milano, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, and White Cube London. She also participated in the 15th Gwangju Biennale in 2024. Her work is held in major international institutional and private collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate in London, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, LACMA, and the Pinault Collection.
 
 
 
White Cube

White Cube is an international contemporary art gallery founded in London in 1993, closely associated with the emergence and international visibility of a new generation of British artists in the 1990s. Since then, it has expanded beyond London with spaces in Hong Kong, Paris, New York, and Seoul, while continuing to present an international program of contemporary art.
 
White Cube Seoul opened in 2023 near Dosan Park in Gangnam. Spanning more than 300 square metres, the space includes exhibition galleries, private viewing rooms, and offices. It is White Cube’s second permanent location in Asia, following Hong Kong.
 
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition: Marina Rheingantz 《Míope》
Dates: September 1–October 24, 2026
Venue: White Cube Seoul (6 Dosan-daero 45-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul)
Website: White Cube Seoul