Collection: Thais T. Martins, visual artist

Thais T. Martins is a multidisciplinary Brazilian artist, born in São Paulo on March 5, 1957.
With a career marked by multiple artistic languages, Thais moves freely between painting, sculpture, puppet theater, literature, photography, and film, nurturing for decades a deep curiosity for forms of expression that bring art and life closer together.

Her relationship with the visual arts began early in her youth: at the age of 15, she studied film at FCCB and Griffe-SP, participating the following year in the II National Super8 Film Festival. At 17, she was invited by the Department of Culture to film the Winter Festival of Campos do Jordão (SP). Around the same time, she wrote and staged musical theater productions.

Between 1976 and 1980, she studied Fine Arts at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP). For over 20 years, she worked as a restorer of oil paintings and polychrome wooden sacred sculptures, including a stay in Italy in 1982, where she attended a short restoration course in Florence. Simultaneously, she developed her own works in watercolor.

After life experiences in Switzerland and an intense engagement with symbolic and playful universes, she created the “Runomos” — dolls inspired by Runes, accompanied by a book she authored. This creation evolved into latex puppet theater, giving rise to the company Broadway Delivery, a musical puppet show that toured for 13 years across theaters, companies, hospitals, TV programs, and festivals. She was even interviewed by Radio Festival (Europe 2) during the World Festival of Puppet Theater in Charleville-Mézières, France. Thais is also the author of the book “Aderbal – Who Said Puppets Don’t Have a Soul” (2007), which narrates this journey.

In 2023, now living in Portugal, Thais began a new artistic phase focusing on acrylic painting. Her current works are built from layers, rhythms, textures, and forms that emerge intuitively, as if the canvas itself reveals its stories. The series “Experiences that Reveal” expresses this quest for the essence hidden beneath the surface, in a continuous process of discovery and contemplation.