Image: Marina Perez Simão, Untitled, 2026. © Marina Perez Simão
Pace Gallery is devoting its stand at Frieze London 2026 to a solo presentation of new paintings by the Brazilian artist Marina Perez Simão. The fair runs from October 14 to 18 in Regent's Park, where the presentation occupies Booth D23.
Perez Simão works across painting, watercolor, drawing and installation, and is known for abstract, rippling compositions that blend inner and outer landscapes. According to the gallery, the new canvases mark a change of direction: rather than spanning a broad palette within each picture, they are organized into three color groups built around magenta, blue and gray.
That narrower range does not make them monochromes, the artist has said. She worked instead with families of related pinks, blues and grays, so that each canvas reads as if it holds a complete palette of its own. Small changes in tone are meant to shift as viewers move in front of the works, sometimes revealing differences in hue and warmth that are not visible at first glance.
Each group follows its own logic. The magenta works, the gallery says, turn away from the bright pinks of popular culture toward pigments found in nature. The blue paintings, which draw on ultramarine, turquoise and manganese blue among others, test how adjacent colors can change the way a single hue is perceived. The gray works combine both approaches and introduce faint touches of yellow and ochre.
Perez Simão speaks of "the alchemy" of color, meaning its ability to change depending on what surrounds it, an interest shaped by her reading in color theory. One starting point for the series was NASA's discovery of GJ 504 b, a pink gas giant several times the mass of Jupiter wrapped in clouds of salt; she has described the resulting paintings as loose descriptions of unfamiliar worlds.
Rather than a conventional fair booth, the presentation is staged as an immersive installation inside a purpose-built architectural setting, intended to slow visitors down and encourage close, quiet looking. The paintings on view, all from 2026 and in oil on linen, range from intimate canvases under a meter wide to works close to two and a half meters tall.
