Susana Rocha holds a degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (2010) and a master's degree in Painting (2012) from the same university. She also holds a Master's degree in Teaching - Visual Arts from the Institute of Education of the University of Lisbon (2013) and a PhD in Visual Arts (2020) from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon.

 

She is the founder and Artistic Director of DUPLEX, where she develops curatorial projects, directs and produces the programming of the DUPLEX gallery and the International Residency Program.

 

She has received several awards and grants, including the Acquisition Prize from the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation (ES) at ARCO Lisboa 2022, a Production Grant from the Supersonic Online Residency (funded by the Lisbon City Council, PT), selected as a Portuguese Emerging Artist by EMERGE, awarded a Studio funded at the Palácio dos Coruchéus by the Lisbon City Council (2019/2023), awarded an Individual Doctoral Grant by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) (2016/2020), Residency Grant from the Largo das Artes/Despina Gallery, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and winner of the “Young Creators Award: Visual Arts”, Portuguese Arts and Ideas Club.

 

Her work is represented in several collections, most notably the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson (ES), Colección Kells (ES), Colección Los Bragales (ES), Colección Zarur (MX), and the Sociedade Nacional de Bellas Artes (PT).

 

Susana Rocha's practice revolves around tensions, explored through a multiplicity of materials imbued with metaphorical potential, which frequently evoke an implicit relationship with a suggested body.

 

This fetishization of materials – fragmented, rearranged, appropriated, perforated, manipulated, and sculpturally reaffirmed – takes the form of a reflection on oneself and the other, enclosing a latency that is undeniably physical, but above all psycho-emotional.

 

Translating a transient sense of life, where the experience of grief and absurdity is strongly present, and frequently resorting to the phenomenon of suggestion to embody absence, limitation, confrontation, discomfort, and failure, the artist develops her projects from personal experiences, whose narrative is almost never explicitly biographical, seeking a universalizing meaning of the struggles and, above all, the tensions of the human condition.