🌿 Stefanie Pullin: A Lisbon-Based Painter Redefining Nature in Contemporary Art

From Guatemala to Lisbon: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Landscape and Memory

Born in Guatemala in 1991 and based in Lisbon since 2010, Stefanie Pullin brings a rare visual language to the world of contemporary painting.

Her works don’t just depict nature—they listen to it. Educated at Ar.Co Academy and the University of Fine Arts in Lisbon, with further studies at the University of Paris, Pullin merges Central American sensitivity with European art education, forming a uniquely reflective visual practice.

Stefanie Pullin - Biography, Shows, Articles & More | Artsy

Explore Stefanie Pullin’s biography, achievements, artworks, auction results, and shows on Artsy.

Artsy

Her paintings unfold like whispered memories—lush, layered, often haunting. Whether she’s working on large-format oil paintings, installations, or visual diaries, the recurring question in her work is: what does it mean to truly see the natural world, rather than just observe it?

Painting the Space Between: What Makes Stefanie Pullin's Work So Resonant

Pullin’s studio practice, currently based in Lisbon’s contemporary art scene, is rooted in slow looking.

Her recent paintings, often large-scale and immersive, don’t reveal themselves easily.

“I’m not interested in recording what nature looks like—but in what emanates from it,” she says.
That quiet but radical intention runs through every brushstroke.

They shimmer somewhere between the figurative and the abstract: jungle flora, stone ruins, water surfaces, all rendered in painterly rhythms that mimic rainfall, erosion, and time.

One canvas might show the ruins of a temple half-swallowed by green—evoking not just landscape, but Guatemala’s mythic geography.

Others highlight the texture of a forest or the stillness of water, never offering full narrative, always insisting on presence.

Lisbon’s Emerging Artists: Stefanie Pullin and the Art of Slowness

In a fast-paced global art market, where Lisbon has become a hub for international residencies and artist collectives, Pullin’s practice stands out for its resistance to spectacle. Her work doesn’t scream. It lingers.

She paints not to decorate the natural world, but to engage with its profound contradictions: chaos vs. order, instinct vs. control, the numinous vs. the profane.

Her use of vertical brush marks, repetition, and semi-erased forms suggest memory, forgetting, and erosion—core themes in both contemporary eco-art and in Latin American visual traditions.

Her Lisbon-based installations often expand into three dimensions.

Archival tables, diagrams, field notes, and botanical sketches bring in a research-based practice that echoes both ethnography and poetry.

She invites you not only to look—but to inhabit the work.

Between the Real and the Imagined: Ecology in Contemporary Painting

What makes her work so emotionally compelling is how it balances conscious control with organic intuition.

She constructs through rhythm and color, allowing each piece to oscillate between clarity and mystery. Pullin’s paintings don’t flatter—they confront.

"Her canvases feel like rituals disguised as landscapes. They aren’t just painted—they’re conjured." — curator note

She has exhibited widely—from Lisbon and Oporto to Paris, Málaga, and Guatemala City—but her studio remains a site of introspection.

Her painting process is tactile, messy, research-driven, and unusually committed to slow, intentional making.

Expanded Themes in Stefanie Pullin’s Work

Nature as sentience, not scenery
She paints the forest not as a view—but as a force watching back.

Perception as ritual
Her work explores the difference between looking, and truly seeing—where observation becomes reverence.

Ecology as memory site
Each layer suggests how nature stores time: decay, erosion, overgrowth as visual language.

The sacred as subtle resistance
Against speed, clarity, and surface—her art offers quiet, slowness, and the ineffable.

Presence as disruption
Human presence isn’t neutral—it alters, scars, rearranges. Her paintings trace that tension.

Painting as threshold
Not representation, but a liminal space—between the visible and the intuited, the natural and the mythic.

Instinct vs. reason as aesthetic method
She navigates compositional tension between control and spontaneity, ritual and chaos.

The ephemeral as form
Pullin’s images are deliberately unstable—haunted by what disappears as much as what remains.

Artist Statement: The Invisible Currents of Stefanie Pullin’s Practice

“It is through her wandering experiences, the mental images given by her thoughts and the photographs of certain details and organic motifs that Stefanie Pullin creates.

Trying to understand the natural world, how we modify it by making ourselves present, occupying space, destroying and building; or what role instinct and feeling play in relation to reason, are some of the features that define her research.”

“Her works explore the knowing how to see and knowing how to look… in a sensible search for the boundaries between the spiritual and the profane; order and chaos; consciousness and instinct.”

Pullin’s work, ultimately, opens a space for reflection—on ecology, memory, and perception. In a world oversaturated with images, her art asks us to pause. To wonder. To remember how to feel awe.

✨ Follow Stefanie Pullin on Instagram to trace the evolution of her jungle-lit worlds — and step deeper into her work via her website.

Let the stillness pull you in.