Image: Pinacoteca de São Paulo
‘Ismael Nery: armadilha moderna’ fills the seven rooms of the Pina Luz building with drawings, paintings and portraits, many of them self-portraits. The exhibition brings together approximately 230 works and proposes a reassessment of Ismael Nery’s singular trajectory within Brazilian modernism.
The exhibition takes place at the Pina Luz building from 5 September 2026 through 31 January 2027. Ismael Nery was born in Belém in 1900 and died in Rio de Janeiro in 1934.
The show begins from a double trap: the instability of the languages running through Nery’s production, from the atmosphere of the belle époque to experiments in Cubism and Surrealism.
Its curatorial proposal also addresses the posthumous construction of Nery as an isolated, tormented and ‘cursed’ figure.
Across the works brought together, the exhibition explores the boundaries between the religious and the worldly, affection and violence, eroticism and the trauma of finitude.
