MILAN.- Clarissa Tossin (b. 1973, Porto Alegre, Brazil) is a Los Angeles–based visual artist investigating the intersections of global economies, colonial histories, migration, and the built environment. Through an approach grounded in research Tossin’s multidisciplinary practice often uncovers hidden links between distant geographies, examining how cultural exchanges and power relations are inscribed in architecture, landscape, and everyday objects.

Tossin studied in Brazil and later relocated to the United States, bringing a transnational lens to her artistic inquiry which employs sculpture, installation, video and photography. Her ongoing dialogue between Brasília, the utopian modernist capital of Brazil, and Los Angeles, a sprawling metropolis shaped by migration and movie industry, reveals how modernity travels, mutates, and manifests across contexts. In her project Brasília, Cars, Pools and Other Modernities (2009–2013), she compares the urban fabric of both cities to expose the contradictions of progress, leisure, and class embedded within modernist design.

Tossin’s 2017 video Ch’u Mayaa reimagines the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mayan Revival houses in Los Angeles through a decolonial lens. The piece transforms the building’s static ornamentation into living movement, based on gesturas and postures found in ancient Mayan pottery and murals. This work exemplifies Tossin’s broader interest in how material culture and design can carry colonial legacies — and how performance can restore alternative narratives.

Another aspect of Tossin’s parctice is focused on ecological thinking and interplanetary futures, connecting environmental degradation on Earth with the fantasies of space colonization.

The exhibition Point of No Return, currently on view at MASP in San Paolo, evokes the critical threshold at which the plante’s environmental degradetion becomes irreversible. Beyond portraying the climate crisis, Tossin incorporates into her works the material elements of catastrophe, grounding her practice in the remnants of a collapsed world – which she calls “future fossils”. These sculptures are made from discarded materials, plant fragments, and casts of her own body. Her work also expands to the macro scale, engagin with maps, flags, and outer space imagery.

Two major climate events shaped the scope of the exhibition: the 2024 floods in Rio Grande do Sul, her birthplace, which inspired Volume morto [Dead Pool] (2025), a large-scale installation evoking traces of an imagined flood; and the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, which destroyed entire neighborhoods—including the home of collectors who owned one of her works.

Tossin was recently recipient of the Bulgari Whitney Biennial American Academy in Rome Fellowship (2025). Her work has been exhibited internationally in several solo exhibitions at institutions including Museu de Arte de São Paulo - MASP (2025); Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, Notre Dame (2025); Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2022); La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France (2021); Moody Center for the Arts, Brochstein Pavilion, Houston (2021); Harvard University, Cambridge (2019); Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2018); Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach (2015); Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2013). Her work was included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Musuem of American Art, New York (2024); Prospect.6 Triennial (2024); in the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2023); the 5th Chicago Architecture Biennial (2023); the 12th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju (2018); Made in L.A., Hammer Museum (2014); SITE Santa Fe Biennial (2014). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)(2025); Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2025); Hammer Museum (2024); The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2024); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2023); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2022); Denver Art Museum, Denver (2021); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2021); New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans (2020); San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose (2018).

Tossin’s work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; New Orleans Museum of Arts; Seattle Art Museum; Casa Niemeyer, Universidade de Brasilia; MSU Broad Museum, East Lansing; Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP); Inhotim Foundation, Brazil; and The Art Institute of Chicago.