Hugo Brazão (b. 1989, Madeira) is a Lisbon-based visual artist working across painting, textile, sculpture and installation. His practice examines the strategies we develop to negotiate uncertainty, often focusing on optimism, escapism, adaptation and the desire for control. Scientific hypotheses, animal behaviour, folklore and popular narratives become starting points for speculative situations in which familiar logics are displaced, exaggerated or taken towards absurd conclusions.

Colour, humour and storytelling are central to this process. Often operating through attraction and misdirection, they allow Brazão to approach anxiety, ecological instability and wider social conditions without resolving them into fixed positions. His works move between image and object, combining textiles, pigments, resin, wood and found materials to produce forms that retain the immediacy of drawing while extending into physical space. Across his practice, fiction becomes a way of testing how we respond to unstable conditions: what we choose to believe, what we adapt to, and what we attempt to escape.

Brazão holds an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2015), and a BA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon (2013). His work has been presented internationally, including at MUDAS – Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Madeira, Culturgest, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Museu Nacional de Artes Decorativas in Madrid and the Musée d’Art Roger-Quilliot in Clermont-Ferrand. He was awarded the VIA Arts Prize in 2018 and the Helen Scott Lidgett Studio Award in 2015, and his work is held in several public and private collections.