At 25 Place des Vosges in Paris, Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino is presenting her first solo exhibition in the French capital. Bloom in the Sunlight, Dream in the Moonlight opened on 19 October 2026 at Mendes Wood DM and continues to 19 December, gathering new paintings and drawings from two ongoing series, Senhora das Plantas and Criaturas do Dia e da Noite, alongside sculptures still in development.

The imagery is immediately striking and deliberately loaded. Female figures grow roots instead of legs, hair that behaves like leaves, and fingers that open into flowers, set against Brazilian vegetation in both daytime and night-time scenes. Paulino has long worked with the intertwined histories of racism, gender and the legacy of slavery in Brazil, and here those histories are mapped onto the body itself: colonial structures and their psychological after-effects become visible as plant forms, protective and unsettling at once.

The Paris show arrives in a landmark year for the artist. She represented Brazil at the 2026 Venice Biennale alongside Adriana Varejao, and in the same month she is the subject of a major solo presentation at The New School in New York. The Paris hang, however, is distinct: it is her debut with the gallery in France and focuses on new work rather than a retrospective view.

What gives the exhibition its charge is the way it refuses to treat its goddesses as decoration. The plant-women draw on Afro-Brazilian traditions in which particular plants carry protective and healing meanings, so beauty and defence are the same gesture. In a season when Paris galleries are crowded with fair-week openings, Paulino's show stands out for insisting that myth, memory and political history can share a single painted body.