A central figure of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila do Amaral (also known as Tarsila) created an original, evocative body of work, drawing on indigenous and popular imagery and on modernizing forces of a rapidly-transforming country.

In the 1920s, moving between São Paulo and Paris, Tarsila ferried between the avant-gardes of these two cultural capitals. Having constructed a “Brazilian” iconographic world, put to the test by the Cubism and Primitivism so in vogue in the French capital at the time, her painting was the root of the Pau-Brasil and Anthropophagic movements, whose search for an “authentic,” multicultural, and multiracial Brazil aimed to refound the country’s relationship with the European “centers” of colonization.

The activist dimension of Tarsila’s paintings from the 1930s and their ability to accompany the profound transformations of her social and urban environment until the 1960s confirm the strength of an oeuvre attuned to her time, always willing to reinvent itself, despite the unstable conditions of the different times and contexts that an emancipated, independent woman artist had to face.

With her invitation to delve into a Brazilian modernity that she contributed to forging even more than she painted it, Tarsila reveals in her production all the complexity of this concept always subject to debate, which raises identity and societal questions of great importance even today, both in Brazil and Europe.