The first thing Ana Margarida Costa shows me when I step over the threshold and into her home studio is ‘The Man in the Shadow’. The lead piece from the Lisbon-based visual artist’s 2025 collection, ‘Vessels’, is a flowing, illusory voyage of darkness and light, explored through a muted colour palette that ripples with rich textures and movement. It’s a dream.
”This artwork is important for me, because it represents someone; a figure, an atmosphere, an environment where people do not let the light consume them. They have always been in the shadows, and that kind of represents the environment that I’ve grown up with here in Portugal, in Lisbon,” she tells me.
”People tend to not value art like we should, like other places in Europe. And this figure, represented in a very dark shadow, doesn’t let the light get inside. In Portuguese, we have this expression, ’You can only dream where your feet can stand,’ because your dreams are too high, you have farther to fall.”
At just 27, the Portuguese creative speaks with an unusual certainty. In contrast to the softness of her brush strokes, Ana Margarida’s words are sharp and to the point, never wasted and always direct. She isn’t interested in discussing colour palettes or artistic influences for very long, and when I ask about technique, the conversation inevitably drifts toward memory. Her medium may be visual, but the sentiment is far more philosophical.
“My work is super personal,” she says. “Visually, I feel like it’s deep, but it makes you think about things in your life. Even if you don’t have the same experience as me, it might make you feel things.”
Inside the Studio
As a perpetual traveller, I’m always eager to dip my toes into the local art scene whenever I land in a new city. Lisbon has been a most welcoming friend. From our base in Lapa, a 10-minute walk in practically any direction will land you in some vibrant creative hub, bursting with the palpable energy of urban nightlife or the hypnotic rhythms of fado. But on this afternoon, across the river and under the towering shadow of Cristo Rei, things are much quieter.
When I arrive at the studio, Ana Margarida greets me with a smile and quickly ushers me inside a small light-filled workshop. Canvases line the floor and the benchtop is hidden beneath a thick layer of sketches and studies. But for all of it, I can’t help but notice the timber.
Stacks of wooden off-cuts and beams are piled neatly to the side, stashed behind nooks and shoved into the rafters. Some, she tells me, have been here for more than three decades. They are the remnants of the studio’s past life, once home to the family carpentry shop where generations of artisans built handcrafted furniture for the local community. Now, it’s a safe haven for a new kind of maker.
”All these things are always super connected with me—where I come from and where I am, the place we all lived and worked, the wood they used to use in the workshop—now I have a different meaning for it,” she says. ”They used to use it to build a bed or a kitchen, and now, I’m here making art about what we’ve been through.”
Painting From Memory
It is a generational story, although not always in the way you might expect. In 2020, Costa began work on an ongoing body of paintings centred around Alzheimer’s disease after her grandfather was diagnosed with the illness. What started out as an attempt to process an intensely personal family experience has gradually evolved into something much broader, exploring the fragile relationship between memory and identity.
”It was kind of a different experience for the whole family,” she says. ”The dynamic was changing. We were seeing someone losing his identity. Someone who was part of my own identity was losing himself during the process. Seeing someone who’s still alive dying; it’s such an interesting experience.”
As Ana Margarida explains, watching her grandfather’s memory fade forced her to confront uncomfortable questions about identity, not only his, but her own. Even when he passed away earlier this year, finality eluded her.
”I still don’t know how to have a conclusion to it,” she admits. ”Because from that experience my identity also changed.”
The Search for Identity
For Costa, whose work largely centres on painting and illustration, art was never an obvious career path. As a child, she filled folders with drawings and sketches, but it wasn’t until she sold her first painting online that she realised this passion could become something more. It wasn’t long before she was carrying a backpack filled with drawings through the streets of Lisbon, laying them out on the pavement after class and selling them directly to strangers.
“I was like, ‘Okay, so I can do this, this works’. I can make art and sell it.”
Like many artists (this writer included), that realisation was both affirming and terrifying. Pursuing a career in the arts meant embracing a life without stability. Career progression and pay rises would be replaced by exhibitions, commissions and odd jobs needed to pay the bills, but more difficult still was convincing the people closest to her that it was the right decision.
”Growing up, I had these thoughts that maybe I was not made for this, maybe I shouldn’t be an artist, because that’s not the way that the other generations did it,” she reveals. ”They tried to advise me the best they can, just to have a better life. But that’s part of my narrative and I will do anything I can to be successful with what I have in my hands.”
And for Ana Margarida, who had spent years watching her grandmother devote herself entirely to her family, sacrificing personal ambitions for familial duties, it was a step into the complete unknown. It was the decision to prioritise creative freedom over all else. ‘Vessels’ is a physical triumph over that uncertainty.
”These artworks really mean that I am capable of being an artist,” she tells me. ”Every time I look at this collection, it’s like ‘I made this, I am here making my work’. That’s something that not many people believed that I could pursue. [The Man in the Shadow] represents a figure and an atmosphere that I was growing up in where people didn’t believe this was possible.”
”This collection represents a kind of emancipation for me, affirming that I am an artist, I’ll be an artist, I will do this all my life, and I understand where I’m coming from.”
Out of the Shadows
The more we talk, the more I realise the role that art plays in Ana Margarida’s life. In many ways, the practice is a form of self-discovery, but the thing that strikes me most is how liberating the process has been. Every time she takes to the canvas, there is a world of opportunities at her disposal and there is an earnestness to that freedom that all artists yearn for. It’s that not-so-simple act of defiance that brings light to the world and the man out of the shadow.
”I don’t want to be that figure,” Ana Margarida tells me. ”I don’t want to be in that environment. I don’t want to follow what other people tell me what I should be doing. I want to create my own path and be an artist. Even if that comes with consequences. I am not someone who’s going to stay in the shadows. I am the light”
Ana Margarida Costa is a Portuguese artist based in Lisbon. She works mainly with painting and drawing and is currently exploring other forms, using art as a way to give form to experiences that shaped her before she had language for them. Memory, upbringing, and the body function as active forces within her work. In 2025, she released ‘Vessels’, her most enveloping collection to date.
