Night Gallery is pleased to announce Flesh Monuments, an exhibition of new paintings by Márcia Falcão. This is the artist’s debut solo presentation in the United States and follows her participation in the 2023 group exhibition The Big Picture. Urgency defines Márcia Falcão’s life and work. Falcão brings to her studio an intense desire, an eagerness to witness the materialization of painting and explore this field of knowledge. Her urgency extends beyond artistic expression to the artist’s need to provide for her family and guarantee her autonomy: Living in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Falcão is also the mother of two children. Biography permeated Falcão’s early works. Recurring motifs included the landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and everyday scenes of people living in the city's suburbs. The landscape was always the backdrop for the human figures, particularly women, whom Falcão represented in palettes of browns and reds. With vigorous gestures and generous, layered applications of paint, Falcão continues to establish an intricate relationship between the body and pictorial matter: She explores flesh in a penetrating way, at times re-enacting the systematic violence that threatens bodies—especially women’s bodies. Other works feature equally intense scenes of ecstasy, suggesting a dramatic duality between pleasure and pain.