Teresa Murta

Teresa Murta (b. 1993) is a Portuguese artist born in Lisbon who lives and works in Berlin. She studied Fine Arts at the Escola Superior de Artes e Design in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal.

Working primarily through painting, Murta explores the fantastic, the absurd and the poetic transformation of reality. Her compositions bring together elements drawn from natural and artificial worlds, allowing bodies, objects and organic forms to shift between abstraction and figuration. Familiar forms become strange and ambiguous, suggesting alternate realities governed by their own unstable logic.

Murta works intuitively and without preparatory sketches or predetermined compositions. Images emerge directly on the surface through a process responsive to memory, emotion and the act of painting itself. Contrasts between the organic and synthetic, recognizable and unfamiliar, become a way of questioning perception and the boundaries through which we understand the visible world. Rather than resolving these tensions, her paintings preserve a sense of uncertainty, inviting the viewer to navigate their own associations.

Her work has been presented internationally in solo exhibitions at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles; Bruno Múrias Gallery, Lisbon; Tabula Rasa Gallery, London; Instituto Camões, Berlin; Uhura Basement, Berlin; and Galeria Aldama Fabre, Bilbao, among others. Recent group exhibitions have taken place at Galeria Municipal do Porto, Porto; Pond Society, Shanghai; Workplace Gallery, London; Albertz Benda, New York; and the National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon. Murta was awarded the Aurora Residency in Portugal in 2016 and received an Honorable Mention for the MyMA Art Grant in 2023.