Ugo Sébastião

Ugo Sébastião’s paintings examine the relationship between historical image-making and contemporary visual culture. Drawing upon Western painting, particularly the Baroque tradition, he isolates and reworks details, portraits and peripheral elements from historical artworks through processes of fragmentation and material intervention. Layers of varnish, pigment and contrasting surfaces create shifting relationships between revelation and concealment, encouraging viewers to reconsider familiar images and the ways in which they are perceived. Central to his practice is the relationship between image and object, with the support and presentation of the work becoming integral to its meaning. By placing historical imagery in dialogue with contemporary modes of viewing, Sébastião creates works that feel simultaneously familiar and disorienting, opening new narrative possibilities while challenging established conventions of representation and exploring how images persist and acquire new meanings over time.

Ugo Sébastião was born in Lyon, France, in 1998. He studied at the Haute École des Arts du Rhin (HEAR), Alsace, graduating in 2019, and completed a DNSEP in Art with honours at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (ENSBA Lyon) in 2023. Recent residencies include Palazzo Monti, Brescia (2022), and the Artist in Residence (AIR) Programme, Bad Ischl (2023). Solo exhibitions include Persistent Shapes, presented at Pal Project, Paris, in 2022, followed by The Doubts in 2025. Selected group exhibitions include presentations at Artissima, Turin (2022, 2023); Infinite Loop at Alice Amati, London (2023); and Relâcher La Paupière at Le CAP Centre d’Art, Saint-Fons (2024). Sébastião currently lives and works in Lyon.