Anna de Castro Barbosa

Born in 1995 in Montpellier, FR
Lives and works in Paris, FR

Anna de Castro Barbosa’s sculptural and installation-based practice unfolds through a heightened attention to encounter: not so much the moment of contact itself, but the tension that precedes it — that unstable space where desire and unease intertwine, where seduction trembles on the edge of repulsion.

Her works are conceived as thresholds, testing grounds in which the body and the gaze are placed under pressure. Working with materials that speak directly to the senses — the coldness of metal, the softness of porous surfaces, the sharpness of a precise line — de Castro Barbosa creates objects and environments that oscillate between attraction and discomfort. What appears welcoming may also constrain; what draws us in may simultaneously keep us at a distance. Her sculptures often seem to await activation, as if requiring a body to grasp them, confront them, or measure itself against them. In this suspended state, they enter into dialogue with the medical instrument, the fetishistic tool, and the prosthesis.

Her practice is shaped by an intimate strangeness: a form of disturbance in which the other is never fully given, but rather sensed, suspected, or approached. Drawing on the porosity between eroticism and the exposure of the body in Bataille, as well as Rebecca Horn’s notion of the extension of gesture and the amplification of touch, de Castro Barbosa explores the ways in which anxiety structures our relationship to the world. For her, unease becomes a driving force — a movement toward alterity that never settles into a reassuring form. Her materials retain the memory of contact: metal absorbing the warmth of a palm, glass marked by fingerprints, surfaces preserving the trace of passage.

Her recent research focuses on notions of play and rules: children’s games, adult games, learning processes, and relational interfaces, understood as frameworks through which the experience of contact with the other, and the construction of desire, are organised. Can an object become a rule of the game? Can a sculpture become a field of experimentation, endlessly replayed? In her work, the playful does not soften the experience, but intensifies it: turning waiting into ritual, disturbance into rule, and hesitation into a space to inhabit.

Anna de Castro Barbosa (born in 1995 in Montpellier, FR) lives in Montreuil and works in Paris. After studying art history, mediation, and museology at the Sorbonne, she entered the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in 2018, where she obtained her DNA in 2021. That same year, she joined the Beaux-Arts de Paris, graduating in 2024 with highest honours under the guidance of Tatiana Trouvé and Dominique Figarella. She is the recipient of the Diptyque Grant, the Bredin-Prat Grant, and the Prix Dauphine for Contemporary Art. She is currently a resident at POUSH, where she continues to develop her practice in the fields of sculpture and installation