Miriam Inez da Silva

Miriam Inez da Silva was an irreverent and transgressive woman, who, connecting elements of Brazilian vernacular culture present in her intimacy, created a work that mirrors the dynamics of Brazil’s modernization processes during the 20th century. The main subject of Inez da Silva’s work is represented in her paintings as a white background. Called “life” by the artist, this is the space of power of the social dimension, the horizons of the plasticity of culture, where relationships reproduce and challenge traditions. Creating complex tensions over these monochromatic backgrounds, Inez da Silva investigates the multiple forces that hold us together as a society, communities, families, friends, couples. There are shared pleasures, love, desire, celebration, belonging, joy, fantasy, magic, faith, as well as oppression, violence, segregation, disputes, conflicts.

Miriam Inez da Silva’s work instantly attracts the eye due to their apparent sweetness and playfulness, but it is necessary to doubt these first impressions and investigate the details and minutiae offered there. The direction of a look, the proportion between the figures, an unexpected coloring: these small transgressions of the conventional forms of representation have enormous symbolic power and show us a malicious, astute, critical, and non-conformist humor, very characteristic of the artist.

From the early 1970s, most art critics in her native Brazil have been classifying Inez da Silva as a “primitive”, “naïf” or “popular” artist, treating her work as something intuitive, naive and traditional. The inclusion (or exclusion) of Inez Silva in these categories is the result of a biased look, informed by colonialism and elitism, unable to recognize the complexities of her work. Where intuition, innocence, purity, and tradition were pointed out, this exhibition finds intention, malice, impurity, and transgression.

Both in her life and artwork, Inez da Silva constantly challenged norms, conventions, and classifications. Makeup, clothes, and unusual behaviors were part of her quest to develop her way of living. In her studio/home in the Flamengo neighborhood, Inez da Silva performed theme parties where guests should arrive dressed in “eccentric” outfits. These were happenings especially enjoyed by her many gay male friends who, at that time, drew the attention of the conservative society in Rio de Janeiro for daily wearing long hair and makeup.

Inez da Silva’s path to freedom also had a kind of singular spirituality. Having been born and raised in a city full of reports of miracles, the artist’s set of beliefs naturally mixed tarot readings, guardian angels, and extraterrestrials. Inez Silva’s relationship with art began by helping her mother to paint landscapes and still lifes and by observing the votive paintings in the Sala dos Milagres (Miracles Room) of the Igreja Matriz de Trindade. Inez Silva also had an extensive formal education as an artist, starting in Goiânia, at the Escola de Belas Artes at the University of Goiás, studying painting between 1955 and 1958, and continuing in the state of Guanabara (current city of Rio de Janeiro), where the artist moved in 1961. In January 1962, Inez Silva studied engraving at the Instituto de Belas Artes and deepened her experiments with woodcutting at the Museum de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, with Ivan Serpa as a teacher.

In 1963 and 1967, with her dark and dreamy woodcuts, Miriam Inez da Silva would participate in the 7th and 9th Bienal de São Paulo. In 1964 and 1966, the artist’s works would be present in the first two editions of the Jovem Gravura Nacional, organized by Walter Zanini at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea of São Paulo. In 1966 and 1968, she would also participate in the two editions of the Bienal da Bahia; and in 1969, she would have works exhibited at the Santiago de Chile Bienal de Gravura. During the 1970s, the artist participated in numerous exhibitions in Brazil and also in France, England, Canada, Italy, Morocco, and Yugoslavia. In 1981, the poet and art critic Theon Spanudis, one of the signatories of the neo-concrete manifesto and one of the greatest thinkers and collectors of the works of Alfredo Volpi and Eleonore Koch, wrote that “Close to José Antônio da Silva, she is, in my opinion, the most important, creative and brilliant Brazilian primitive ”.