Mateus Morbeck (Brazilian, b. 1980) is a visual artist, architect and urbanist whose work begins with specific real-world events and their physical traces to examine the environmental and economic systems that produced them. Based in Salvador, Bahia, he works across photography, digital art, objects and installations, often collecting or appropriating material evidence and transforming it into new works.
In 2019, an oil spill along Brazil's northeastern coast contaminated marine life and left fishing communities without income.Morbeck traveled to more than 50 locations across Bahia state to document the spill's effects, photographing volunteers who cleaned oil from the beaches for Guardiões.,The portraits are overlaid with traces of the crude oil itself, obtained by pressing paper directly into the contaminated water.Guardiões entered the collections of the Museu da Fotografia de Fortaleza in Brazil and the Mediterraneum Collection in Catania, Italy.,In Nemo Non Videt, made during the COVID-19 pandemic, he layered live camera feeds, satellite imagery and Google Street View captures of empty cities. Onto these he added a map charting the spread of the virus from the date of the first recorded death in each location shown.
He is the author of the photobook Maré de Agosto (2021), which addresses the 2019 oil spill along Brazil's coast.,The book won the Prêmio das Artes Jorge Portugal and received an honorable mention at the PX3 – Prix de la Photographie in France.In 2022 Morbeck held his first solo exhibition, “É tudo depois”, in Salvador, curated by fellow artists Fábio Gatti and Lanussi Pasquali.,The show's five works, including photographs and installations made with materials gathered from environmental disaster sites, responded to the 2020 wildfires that burned the Chapada Diamantina and to the 2019 oil spill.
In 4Rd3 0x002 (2024), he built a one-minute timelapse from thermal-anomaly graphs recorded between 1951 and 2024. The graphs are overlaid with a digital glitch effect and a JavaScript-generated animation of interconnected geometric lines, set to a layered soundscape of noise.The work entered the RARE Collection on the platform SuperRare.In 2024 he also released KEEP BUILDING on SuperRare, a generative project inspired by modern and brutalist architecture that combines photography, pre-rendered generative imagery and AI-generated images.
