SIMONE KESTELMAN

About the Artist

Simone Kestelman is a sculptor and multi-media artist whose practice spans glass, ceramics, photography, and intervention in found and everyday objects. Born and raised in Niterói, Brazil, she began working in ceramics at the age of seven—an early immersion into shaping material and form in a cultural landscape saturated with art, music and lush geography, yet shadowed by social inequality and violence. Her formal academic roots include a BA in Economics from University Gama Filho in Rio de Janeiro.

Kestelman’s work has appeared in galleries and public spaces in Brazil and the United States, and her pieces are held in private and institutional collections. Her visual language emerges from archetypal concerns—life and death, love and violence, ambition and survival—all expressed through material acts of transformation.

Artistic Practice

In Simone Kestelman’s hands, glass, ceramic, and photography become active agents of meaning—objects repurposed, materials reshaped, surfaces altered. A ceramic red balloon may hover against expectation; a glass swing may encase barbed wire in paradox; a footstool may be sheathed in razor blades. These juxtapositions charge the everyday with tension and urgency. She intervenes viscerally on objects whose familiarity offers comfort, only to reveal what hides beneath: the violence done to women and children, the silent ambition that overrides compassion, the human cost of neglect. As she says, “I reflect and comment on important social issues by looking at them from a personal yet global lens.”

From Brazil’s social currents to an American studio environment, Kestelman weaves the personal and the political. She uses interventions, material disruption and aesthetic dissonance to open up spaces where meaning cannot be articulated in words—a universal visual language that asks the viewer not only to see, but to feel, to question, to awaken.

Featured Exhibition at iO

Power of LoveAt iO Arts Center, Simone Kestelman’s Power of Love transforms the gallery into a charged arena of emotional encounter. In this solo exhibition she presents major works that address the raw terrain of love and its opposites—desire and violence, hope and despair, care and neglect. Through glass forms shimmering with light and shadow, ceramic pieces that invert expectation, and photographic elements that hold witness, Power of Love explores the power-relations embedded in affection, the gendered violence hidden inside idealised love, and the redemptive possibility of tenderness reclaimed.

The exhibition evokes a dual truth: that love can heal and that its violation can wound; that strength can emerge in vulnerability. Visitors are drawn into rooms of material resonance—where a blown-glass vessel might catch a shard of light like memory, where a ceramic balloon invites buoyancy yet is tethered with steel. The work aligns with iO’s mission of multisensory awakening, art as experience, and the unification of human connection with consciousness.

Alignment with the iO Arts Center Mission

Simone Kestelman’s art is a perfect fit for iO’s commitment to expanding sensory awareness, bridging disciplines, and elevating the unseen into visibility. She transforms material into metaphor and invites the viewer into an active encounter rather than passive observation. Her emphasis on social justice, on giving voice to survivors and exposing hidden violence, resonates deeply with iO’s vision of art as both aesthetic and ethical activation. In Power of Love, love’s power is not sentimental—it is urgent, subversive, healing—and thus aligns with iO’s belief that art matters not just for beauty, but for truth.

Artist Philosophy

“In my work I use beauty and lightness to encourage people to face their relationships with love, life, fear of death, sadness, betrayal, greed and ambition.”