Clara Benfatti (1984) lives and works in São Paulo. She holds a degree in art education from Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (São Paulo, 2010) and a master’s in visual arts from the University of Porto (Porto, 2019). Her research focuses on the multiple aspects of the relationships that take shape within cities. Initially engaging with the metropolis as defined in the twentieth century, Benfatti’s work now explores new urban configurations, the twenty-first-century city as an expanded territory. In much of her earlier work, Benfatti used drawing as the primary means of materialization. These drawings, once highly figurative, have evolved toward forms that flirt with abstraction to discuss these new cartographies through techniques previously unexplored by the artist, such as oil painting and ceramics.

Among her main solo exhibitions are Tudo agora mesmo pode estar por um segundo (gruta, São Paulo, 2024), Inventário de Percursos Banais (Espaço AL859, Porto, 2019), and Outras Cidades (Zipper, São Paulo, 2015). Her notable group exhibitions include Sudoeste, Noroeste (Lugar do Desenho, Porto, 2018), Na ponta da vista (Galeria Ponder70, São Paulo, 2017), and Estruturas Imaginárias (Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Campo Grande, 2014). In 2013, she received an acquisition award at the 41st Salão de Arte Contemporânea Luiz Sacilotto, and her work is part of the collection of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Campo Grande.

In Untitled (2024), from the series Desert, Benfatti departs from an understanding of maps as formal representations of a static reality — containing information, directions, and knowledge about a territory’s surface — to address their inherent duality: while they seek to depict the world with precision, they also carry a degree of abstraction. From this starting point, she finds in cartography a material suited for deconstructing territories, crossing borders, tracing imaginary routes, and drawing impossible places. For the artist, “here there are no hegemonic logics nor representational protocols.” On the canvas, she presents a landscape that transcends locality, transforming the desert into a universal idea.