Benelisa Franco

Benelisa Franco was born in Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 1956. From 1975 to 1980 she studied architecture at the University of Sao Paulo. In 1985 she came to Germany as a scholarship holder of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. From 2004 onwards she ran an artist’s studio in the Botanikum artists’ colony in Munich for years. It was not until mid-2024 that she moved her workplace to the Künstlerhof Munich Neuhausen. In her various series, the artist creates paintings about social themes such as the role of women or conflicts in the world and society. She focuses on utopia, dreams and transitions: Often, she feels like a wanderer between worlds, between her old and her new home, between reality and ideality, between problems and their possible solutions. Hence, she locates her position as an artist in a “transit area”, a metaphorical place that, like an airport, cannot be assigned to either the past or the future, but which offers the possibility of flow, of options, of the unexpected, of being the observer, of reformulating ideas and desires. Right there she takes sketches and notes from other fellow travelers and reflects on herself in an artistic way. The sketched designs on paper are often used as a preliminary stage for her large-format works on canvas. So far, Benelisa Franco has mainly exhibited in Germany, Switzerland and Portugal. Since 2024 she has been represented by LDXArtodrome Gallery.