Overview
Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York, is pleased to present Over Again, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Brooklyn-based, Brazilian artist Ana Cláudia Almeida. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.
Almeida is an artist whose work explores materiality through movement and mark-making, incorporating a range of media including paper, plastic, oil pastels, paint, video, and sculpture. Her practice seeks to disrupt the functional role of objects by examining the dynamic tension between interior and exterior, individual and environment. The fluttering nature of her works on fabric, the shifting quality of her sculptures, and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of her large-scale paintings transform intangible memories into physical form.
In Over Again, drawing, oil painting, sculpture, and plastic collide in what Almeida describes as an “ecosystem of pieces,” where each medium leaks into the next—a monotype that wants to be a drawing, a drawing that yearns to be a painting, and plastic remnants that refuse to be cast aside. Processes coexist and collide across surfaces, embodying the changeability that sustains both life and artistic practice. Her work reflects the cyclical nature and plasticity of life, tracing the ways in which every action leaves an imprint that shapes what comes next.
Almeida is an artist whose work explores materiality through movement and mark-making, incorporating a range of media including paper, plastic, oil pastels, paint, video, and sculpture. Her practice seeks to disrupt the functional role of objects by examining the dynamic tension between interior and exterior, individual and environment. The fluttering nature of her works on fabric, the shifting quality of her sculptures, and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of her large-scale paintings transform intangible memories into physical form.
In Over Again, drawing, oil painting, sculpture, and plastic collide in what Almeida describes as an “ecosystem of pieces,” where each medium leaks into the next—a monotype that wants to be a drawing, a drawing that yearns to be a painting, and plastic remnants that refuse to be cast aside. Processes coexist and collide across surfaces, embodying the changeability that sustains both life and artistic practice. Her work reflects the cyclical nature and plasticity of life, tracing the ways in which every action leaves an imprint that shapes what comes next.
Almeida’s new body of work—and the exhibition’s title—draws inspiration from Brazilian musician Tim Maia’s song Over Again, which she embraces as a mantra urging liberation from rigid patterns in mind, body, and daily life. Literature, music like Maia’s, and the people she’s met have opened her to alternative ways of living, offering a vision of a less harsh existence. “Precisely in the moments when everything felt more urgent than fabulation, allowing myself that exercise was one of the greatest experiences of freedom I could have had… and now my new pleasure is to lean into the place that hope occupies in the lives of us, Black people.”
In works like Cascata II (2025), Almeida revisits the notion of freedom—inseparable, for her, from hope. The largest work in the exhibition is composed of vividly painted fabric that cascades from the gallery ceiling. Its free-flowing brushstrokes unfurl in winding swaths of color, a stunning display of the artist’s intuitive process. This sense of unrestrained movement extends throughout the exhibition: in Dew (gripe) and Belly full of liquids (both 2025), Almeida uses expanses of white space to frame and amplify her vibrant, expressive line drawings.
For Over Again, Almeida assembles a constellation of works that speak to difference, resilience, and the radical act of imagining otherwise. Together, they form what she calls “an essay for a world of differences and complexities”—a defiant refusal of the “machine of existence-flattening” and an invitation to inhabit a space where freedom and hope are lived, shared possibilities.
Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York, is pleased to present Over Again, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Brooklyn-based, Brazilian artist Ana Cláudia Almeida. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.
