Debora Ando
(DE)
Debora Ando was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and has been living and working in Germany since 2019. She studied fine arts at the Universidade de São Paulo, graduating in 2002, and completed a master's degree in visual arts practices at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Ireland in 2011. From 2013 to 2019, she taught in the printmaking department at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin; since 2020, she has been a lecturer in printmaking and drawing at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
Ando has received several scholarships and grants, including the NEUSTART Kunstfonds Stiftung scholarship (2022), a project scholarship from the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation as part of the program “150 Years of Villa Hügel – 150 Projects for the Ruhr Area” (2024) and in 2026, the Dortmund Cultural Office's Fine Arts Grant for her project Studies on Non-Places. Her work has been presented in numerous projects and exhibitions in Europe, South America and Asia.
In her artistic practice, she explores space as a cosmos of repetition, entropy, temporality, and transience. Space appears as the indefinable, wild, and intangible – beyond measurable units. She understands each of her works as a place: as a pause in space, as an attempt to close and capture it. However, they do not aim to provide answers, but rather to open up spaces for reflection. With a focus on printmaking, drawing and camera-less photographic processes, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to questioning traditional processes both in terms of materials and in her examination of the medium and its spatial location. By extending these media into the installation space, she uses space as a continuation of the surface – as a place of tangible and, at the same time, questionable perception.
(Photo © Jens Sundheim)
