Artist Biography & Research Statement 

Geraldo Dos Santos (b. 1993, Amsterdam, NL) is a transnational artist whose life and practice have been shaped by moving across cultural, linguistic, and geographical landscapes in the Netherlands, Brazil, and Peru. He studied at the National Art University of Lima (Peru), specializing in Artes Plásticas, before returning to the Netherlands to further his exploration of contemporary art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, where he graduated from the Fine Arts department in 2020. In 2023, he completed a Master’s degree in Autonomous Contexts at Sint Lucas Antwerp, with minors in Narrative Strategies and Aesthetics. Parallel to his artistic practice, Dos Santos studied Art Education at the Willem de Kooning Academie, graduating in 2025.

Dos Santos’s research engages with the intimate past, focusing on memory, cultural hybridity, and the interplay of South American anthropological systems with personal narratives. His practice situates itself at the intersection of heritage, tradition, and materiality, often using everyday and ritual elements as vehicles to examine broader questions of identity. Working as both a colorist and a materialist, he investigates how personal and collective trajectories intersect, creating what he calls “strange relationships” – ambiguous, symbolic connections that resist straightforward categorization.

His works span painting, ceramics, drawing, and installation, and are marked by a sensitivity to narrative strategies that invite the viewer to reflect on their own memories and emotions. By using emulsion as a conceptual metaphor – the coexistence of different elements without complete fusion – Dos Santos mirrors the layered and unstable nature of belonging, memory, and cultural transmission.

Thematically, his work explores the complexities of human interaction and cultural symbiosis: how tradition and identity are negotiated, displaced, and reconfigured. He is particularly drawn to subconscious triggers of melancholia, emotional attachments, and symbolic gestures embedded in ritual. By integrating autobiographical experience with South American cultural systems, Dos Santos creates intimate yet universal propositions that blur the boundaries between the personal and the collective.

Through his installations and objects, Dos Santos also engages with visual sociology, examining how cultural systems, ritual practices, and personal archives shape our perception of the world. His works resist homogenization, instead emphasizing fragmentation, hybridity, and transformation. The layering of mediums creates multi-dimensional readings where material, memory, and narrative converge.