- Bruna Grinsztejn
Opening Reception, Saturday, April 4, 1pm - 4pm
Limited free seating is available on a roundtrip chartered bus from New York City for the April 4th opening. Reservations are required and can be made on this by calling +1 845-758-7598 or emailing Mary Rozell at mrozell@bard.edu.
Artist: Maria Auxiliadora da Silva
Maria Auxiliadora da Silva: Imprinted in My Mind brings together paintings by Maria Auxiliadora da Silva (Brazil, 1935–1974) that center rural and urban settings. Da Silva moved from her hometown of Campo Belo, in the rural area of Minas Gerais, to the large metropolis of São Paulo at a very early age, yet the countryside remained a recurrent subject throughout her oeuvre. These scenes were not direct observations but depictions conjured from memory or passed through her mother—what she described as images “imprinted in her mind.” The exhibition pairs these paintings with urban scenes that present people in moments of daily life, sociability, and leisure, creating a snapshot of the bustling São Paulo of the 1960s and early ’70s.
By placing these two realms in dialogue, Imprinted in My Mind traces how da Silva’s experience of modernity informed both environments. Responding to the tensions of a rapidly changing social and urban fabric, her work captures the contradictions and uneasy reconciliations of modern life through details and lingering traces that challenge reductive labels—such as naive, outsider, or primitive—long imposed on her practice.
With a vivid palette and brimming use of pictorial space, da Silva’s depicts rural life in a way that resists idealization, revealing layered intersections of memory, landscape, and imagination. The scenes of labor and bountiful fields are populated with individuals who often disrupt their routines to do something else: to engage romantically, or to play. These moments provoke complex reflection on the field—not only as a site of toil but also as a place of disarming playfulness, idleness, burning desire, and even quiet subversion of the day’s expected order.
Her paintings of public urban spaces, by contrast, demonstrate a keen attunement to the dynamics of her time, depicting seemingly ordinary city scenes while embedding countless signs that resist any reductive labeling that would exclude her from contemporary art discourses. In choreographing these encounters within the labyrinthine urban fabric—permeated by mass-culture symbols—da Silva captures the pulse, rhythm, and energy of the city.
This exhibition is supported by The Jenni Crain Foundation, an initiative dedicated to preserving the legacy of the esteemed artist and curator.
