Rosana Paulino Brings Her Plant Goddess Pantheon to Paris

Rosana Paulino opens her first solo exhibition in Paris this week at Mendes Wood DM's French capital outpost, presenting 16 new paintings — five on paper and 12 on canvas — under the title "Bloom in the Sunlight, Dream in the Moonlight."

The show adds new figures to the Afro-botanical pantheon the Brazilian artist has been building since 2019 in her ongoing series "Senhora das Plantas" (Lady of the Plants). The series elevates Black women to the status of goddesses in communion with nature — without romanticizing that communion. On the larger scale of the Paris works, color deepens and the bodily poses grow more inventive.

Where did the goddesses come from?

The question guiding Paulino's work since the 1990s has been: "What is it like to be a Black woman in Brazil?" She seemed to have answered it, until 2018, through an indictment of slavery's enduring consequences in Brazilian society. Works from that phase include Parede da Memória (Memory Wall, 1994), which engages with the extensive gaps in the family trees of Black Brazilian families, and Assentamento (Settlement, 2013) — three photographs of an enslaved Black woman printed on fabric, fragmented, stitched back together, and given a heart and a baby.

Those photographs were appropriated from images by Auguste Stahl, taken during the 1865–66 Thayer Expedition to Brazil. Paulino's gesture aimed to restore the woman's humanity and history from a set of pictures originally made to substantiate claims of racial degeneration supposedly caused by racial mixing.

At her 2018 retrospective at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Paulino debuted drawings from the early 2000s that anticipated the goddesses' psychological territory. Marked by restless lines, they depict a woman tentatively emerging from a cocoon in a ritual of transformation and emancipation. "Drawing is a central foundation of Rosana's practice; it sheds light on her imagination. Forms and ideas that she develops through drawing later acquire spatiality," Valéria Piccoli, the exhibition's cocurator, told ARTnews. "It was important to emphasize that she was the first voice in the 1990s to speak about the issue of Black women, but also to highlight that this was part of a much broader context of her interests and desires."

Less than a year after the retrospective, the earliest botanical goddesses appeared. Drawn in earth tones and nude, they carried no trace of the hypersexualization of the Black female body. The series began with the plants Paulino keeps in her studio — she first called them simply "folhas" (leaves).

"I gradually realized that it couldn't be that simple: plants have a history, so I began to approach them more specifically," Paulino explained in a recent interview in her studio. She started the series, she noted, because she could find no Black goddesses in books devoted to the sacred feminine.

How the series grew

The progression is botanical and material at once:

• She began with snake plants (Espada de Iansã in Portuguese), then turned to the jatobá tree.
• Works appeared in the 2022 and 2026 Venice Biennales and the 2023 Bienal de São Paulo — the world's two oldest recurring exhibitions.
• For São Paulo, she moved from watercolor on paper to canvas, scaling drawings up to nearly 9 by 20 feet.
• Next came the mangrove: goddesses with roots anchored in the earth and crowns of leaves that sway with the wind.

This year, her investigation into Comigo Ninguém Pode (scientifically Dieffenbachia) — a toxic plant also associated with spiritual protection — lent the Brazilian Pavilion in Venice its title. Pavilion curator Diane Lima first saw the works at Mendes Wood DM's New York space: "They convey a sense of mystery and magic; there is a certain aurality to them that truly moves us," she said. "And it had that same impact in Italy. It is the exhibition's great amulet, and it's no coincidence that it is positioned right at the entrance."

Paulino prepares her canvases with a gesso mixture (a primer that seals the weave) so they behave like paper under her watercolor and acrylic, and she works flat on a table. The choice is conceptual too. "I'm not going to reproduce the watercolor brushstrokes on canvas. But at the same time, this idea of vertical painting is very Western. […] My thing is to work on a table," she said.

What does Paris actually get?

The Paris show introduces what Paulino calls "nocturnal" canvases — new goddesses, or new versions of existing ones, tied to angel's trumpet (Brugmansia). The plant's flowers come in white, salmon, purple, lilac and pink, with a luminosity that makes the petals seem translucent. They are also extremely toxic: used at times as a hallucinogen, ingestion can cause severe mental confusion and even death.

Paulino embraces that duality. "It's a plant with a certain weight to it—a size, a scent. But it's one of the most dangerous plants there is. Many people have lost their lives after ingesting teas containing it," she said.

In Angel's Trumpet (2026), a figure sits on the ground, roots dangling from her knees, branches emerging from her eyes bearing trumpet-shaped flowers. An untitled 2026 bromeliad goddess twists her torso in a yoga-like pose, leaves emerging from her mouth as if she had been chattering animatedly. Her tightly coiled cropped hair was made with a tool Paulino built herself: a branch with a sponge attached to its tip.

"You don't need long, flowing hair to be a goddess," she said. "My series 'Senhoras das Plantas' exists because woman is an archetype that the West cannot fully comprehend."

With her research into plantas de poder (plants of power used for spiritual protection in Afro-Brazilian religious traditions) only deepening, and the day-night cycle growing more expansive in her work, the Paris debut positions Paulino's pantheon for its widest European audience yet.