Great Luck

Susana Bravo

For Susana Bravo, every painting is a story waiting to be told. Daughter of a Portuguese father and an English mother, she grew up between two cultures, a dual heritage that still shapes the way she sees the world. She found in painting a way to express herself from an early age and began her artistic career in the 1980s. She studied Painting at ESAP, where she also completed a postgraduate degree in Contemporary Art, and went on to earn a master’s in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. Her stories come from many places, from cinema, literature, folk tales, oral tradition or an unexpected conversation. They are often told through a woman’s eyes, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes inspired by ordinary women, real or imagined. Each work is built in layers, like a palimpsest. Susana paints over what has already been painted, hiding, revealing and reinterpreting, until the final image becomes a narrative body where different times and voices live side by side. Alongside painting, she works in etching, watercolour and postal art, and has developed projects such as a commission for the Corinthia Hotel in Lisbon and an artist residency in Caldas da Rainha. She has held solo exhibitions since 1993 in Portugal and Brazil, including Cooperativa Árvore, Galeria Solar de Santo António, Galeria Autoria and Espaço Miguel Torga in Sabrosa, as well as Galeria ACBEU and the Teixeira Leal Museum in Salvador da Bahia. In 2025 she received two honourable mentions, at the 8th Espinho Art Biennial and the Mário Botas Prize at the 1st Nazaré Biennial, adding to an honourable mention at the Carmen Miranda Prize (2015) and the Acquisition Prize from the National Association of Young Entrepreneurs (1997). Susana Bravo’s painting is a place where memory and imagination meet, where the lived and the dreamed become a single image.