Felippe Moraes, 1988
born in Rio de Janeiro
lives and works between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
Artist Statement
At my first group exhibition in 2009, when a curator asked me “What moves you?”, I answered: “everything that exceeds us.” That answer became a defining compass for my practice.
My work proposes a conceptual inhabiting of what empties out our emotional and intellectual vocabulary, leading us toward an understanding of existence close to the sublime. As an artist, I see my practice as a revealing more than a making. I understand art as a way of thinking and investigating through methods that differ from science, philosophy or spirituality, but I constantly draw on them to expand, question and negate them, occupying the voids they leave behind.
My work is a celebration of how the experience of the tangible enables a grasp of the intangible with rhetorical and poetic eloquence. It is a revelation that occurs through absence, through ellipsis, through the space between epistemological characters. A revelation of what is infinite, invisible, hidden, what conceals itself behind the horizon and is, ultimately, immeasurable.
Felippe Moraes
Bio
Felippe Moraes has worked as an artist, researcher and independent curator since 2009. Lives and works between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. His research is grounded in the relations between epistemology, natural phenomena and spirituality, with particular attention to the perception of the intangible. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art from the University of Northampton (UK) and was a researcher at the Colégio das Artes, Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal), between 2016 and 2019. Since 2022, he has served on the advisory board of MAC-Niterói.
His main solo projects include Solfejo, presented at Centro Cultural FIESP in 2019 and at CAIXA Cultural venues in Rio de Janeiro, Brasília and Curitiba between 2024 and 2025; Ovo Cósmico (2023-24), at Galeria Verve; and Samba Exaltação, a series of neon works quoting Brazilian popular songs, first realized as an urban intervention on Vale do Anhangabaú (São Paulo), followed by exhibitions at MAC-Niterói, Museu de Arte do Rio (2021) and Festival SESC de Inverno in Petrópolis (2025). That same year, he also presented Samba da Luz at Biblioteca Mário de Andrade and Estação da Luz.
He has previously held the solo exhibitions Imensurável (2018), at CAIXA Cultural Fortaleza; Proporción (2018), at Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo (EAC), Montevideo; Cosmografia (2017) and Ordem (2014), both at Baró Galeria, São Paulo; and Progressão (2016), at MAC-Niterói.
He is the author of the public works Monumento ao Horizonte (2016), on Caminho Niemeyer in Niterói, and Monumento a Euclides (2017), in Romania. He has taken part in major group exhibitions such as the 13th Mercosul Biennial (2022), curated by Marcello Dantas; the 19th and 20th Cerveira Biennial; and Trienal Frestas (2014), curated by Josué Mattos.
His work is held in collections including Museu de Arte do Rio, Soho House São Paulo, MAM-SP, MACRS, MAC-Niterói and Centro Cultural São Paulo. He has received awards from institutions including Instituto Tomie Ohtake, the City of Rio de Janeiro, University of Coimbra, Itaú Cultural and FUNARTE.