Katia Wille
About
““I want the work to expand beyond space, in many different ways, and penetrate the body as a whole: through the eyes, through the ears, through the pores, and that, with strength yet gently, it invades us entirely.” - Katia Wille
Katia Wille (b. 1971, Brazil) is a visual artist and researcher. She lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, where she maintains her studio. Her work includes paintings, objects, wearable installations, and cognitive installations. Throughout her trajectory across the fields of visual arts, fashion, and design, Katia creates images in a convulsive manner, working with tensions between presence and absence as central themes in her research. The body, always in motion, appears and disappears incessantly to the viewer, forming polytropies that stretch form and color to their limits—creating a scene that invites the spectator to become part of the work. Within this landscape, the artist navigates in order to bring forth a cohesion of bodies, brushstrokes, and shapes that are at once light, complex, and vibrant.
The metaphor—always incomplete—that is the feminine, and the exuberance that captivates the gaze, conceals and reveals, through iridescent tones, fragments of bodies, and layered colors, the strangeness that may affect us whenever we question our place in the world.
During 2023 and 2024, Katia has been investigating the presence of the artwork on the body, based on the artistic residency project O Avesso do Vestir, developed in partnership with the Museu Bispo do Rosário (MBrac) in Rio de Janeiro. The project proposes the creation of wearable and penetrable works and installations made from discarded textiles, developed through collective creative workshops with the community surrounding the institution. The entire project is rooted in research conducted by the artist within the archive of Arthur Bispo do Rosário’s work between February and August 2023, with completion expected in May 2024. Between 2018 and 2020, the artist dedicated herself to the research and development of cognitive sculptures in partnership with the technology company Microsoft, creating installations that moved in response to human emotions through Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Questioning the relationship between humans and machines, the project—titled Tota_Machina—was exhibited at the Museu da República (Rio de Janeiro) in 2019 and at the Museu de Arte Sacra (São Paulo) in 2020.
Katia Wille presented her most recent solo exhibition in October 2024 at the theBlanc Gallery in New York. Since 2015, her practice has been featured in important institutions, contemporary art galleries, and cultural centers across the capitals Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais, including her exhibition Pilotis (2022), held on the ground floor of Casa Fiat de Cultura in Belo Horizonte. Among her previous exhibitions are Tota Machina (2020) at the Museu de Arte Sacra de São Paulo and Das Tripas Coração (2019) at the Museu da República in Rio de Janeiro. Her work is held in private collections in Brazil, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France, demonstrating her presence within the international contemporary art circuit. Through a sensitive and provocative language, Wille explores the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, questioning the layers of identity and the materiality of the body.
Born in the northern zone of Rio de Janeiro, Katia Wille graduated in Fashion Design from SENAI/CETIQT (Rio de Janeiro) in 1994. She later studied Art and Fashion Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AMFI) in the Netherlands between 1997 and 2000, and co-founded the brands Zigfreda and BabyZig between 2002 and 2013. She worked as creative director for Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, and O’Neill across Europe, Asia, and the United States, in addition to working for the Maria Bonita/Maria Bonita Extra group and the company Alpargatas S/A in Brazil. Between 2014 and 2016, Katia served as a guest professor for the course Creative Processes in the Arts and Design program at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).
