McClain Gallery is proud to present Bruna Massadas: The Edge of the World, our first solo exhibition of the Brazilian-born, Montana-based artist’s work. The Edge of the World features acrylic and oil stick paintings on canvas alongside small works on paper stemming from her Canal series. The works are inspired by Massadas’ birthing and postpartum experiences, and the word itself relates both to the body and land feature. As is characteristic of the artist’s output, saturated color permeates the exhibition. The hues harmonize with ripples and arcs rendered in acrylic paint as well as staticky, textured oil stick application. Each composition revolves around a sole sun perched at the top of each painted world, its reflection meanders or drips down the canvas as though carving a path: the canal takes center stage.
In Massadas’ paintings the canal, at once a solid, warm painted shape, a shimmery moving light, and a path through which to travel, is a shapeshifter that invites the eye to travel up or down the canvas. The symbolism of the canal is similarly multifaceted. Massadas’ ground-shifting experience of carrying her son to term was her first foray into abstraction: for the first few weeks of Rio’s life, she says: “I could only see objects in fragments. I experienced vivid moments of taking a walk with my newborn during the winter months and seeing the sky filled with little static lines like a Van Gogh; or looking at my baby and my husband across the room and seeing them like a Seurat.” Abstraction was a reality in those early days, in a visual, experiential way. The canal, then, is a passageway through which to explore the bounds of reality and how slippery our grasp of its edges can become.
For humans, following the path of a celestial body is a bone-deep instinct, and the knack for Massadas to document and share her journey through her work became essential. In The Edge of the World, the overwhelming color of the works wriggles on either side of the canal and, thanks to the scale of the paintings, envelops the viewer. The vertical works feel like traveling toward the light and the horizontal paintings’ compositions curve along the horizon, reaching around the body like a hug. Massadas’ work shares space with transcendentalists and symbolists: other female painters who work in a similar vein like Agnes Pelton, Hilma af Klint, Loie Hollowell. The spirituality of the work is inescapable but so is its sensuality – the texture and handling of the paintings’ materials, manipulated by Massadas’ hands; the symmetry and flamboyance of the paintings; the story of Rio’s birth; Rio’s name, which means river in Portuguese, Massadas’ mother tongue; the river: the canal.
The small works on paper are experiments in acrylic and oil pastels. An immediate exploration of color and texture, this format develops from small ink drawings that allow Massadas to focus on composition. At times, the colorful studies become stepping stones toward a painting, as we might imagine Canal Study #1 was for Canal #1. Just as often the drawings remain solid, discrete works.
Massadas’ work is hypnotic and veers close to the psychedelic. In much of her other series of works, landscapes and characters she depicts are isolated, sometimes desolate. Massadas’ color combinations and land morphology evoke sci-fi landscapes, reminiscent of the alien, dusty lands in the book and movie-franchises Dune or those traveled by iconic graphic-novel character Yoko Tsuno. Simultaneously, the artist’s distinct voice offers a joyful outlook: despite different circumstances, all have an understanding of the cyclic nature of the world, each person awestruck by its breadth. But as sure as the sun will rise each morning, trust that every instance will be unique. Like Massadas interpreting her new reality in motherhood and gifting it to us, each can aim for that same rhythm – every day a new sun, everyday under the same guiding star.
BRUNA MASSADAS' (b. 1985, Brazil) paintings depict a new world in silence, with solitary birds, rivers and mountains in meditative calm. Now living in Montana, Bruna Massadas draws from the extreme landscapes of both regions to create her current body of work. Merging the tropical vistas of her native Rio de Janeiro with the volcanic formations of her neighboring Yellowstone Park, her work envisions a strange planet: a world of abundant space, possibility, and color, but also a world of scarcity.
From 2018–2021 Massadas exhibited with Binder of Women, and from 2016–2018 she was a member of CTRL+SHFT collective. Recently her work has been exhibited at The Pit (Los Angeles), Bozomag (Los Angeles), My Pet Ram (New York), and Gallery 16 (San Francisco). She also exhibited in two-person shows with Raymie Iadevaia (2022, Bozomag) and Daniel Gibson (2017, Some.Time.Salon). Massadas earned her BFA at California State University, Fullerton (2009) and MFA at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California (2012). In 2025, she was awarded a Creative West Grant; she had a solo exhibition at de boer Gallery, Los Angeles, California. Massadas is represented by McClain Gallery; her first solo exhibition, The Edge of the World, with the gallery was in May 2025.