An observer of daily life who experienced and portrayed different cultures and facets of Brazil.

Djanira da Motta e Silva grew up as the daughter of a working-class couple with Indigenous and European ancestry. She was self-taught and, due to her gender, was for a long time unjustly described as a “primitive” and “naïve” artist. The artist herself, who always signed her works with just her first name, Djanira, vehemently rejected these labels. She deliberately developed a simplified artistic language in order to comment on social inequalities. Surrounded by other artists in the Santa Teresa neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, she began to paint in the 1940s, starting with portraits of herself and her neighbours. When she exhibited her paintings for the first time in 1943, her work was praised by fellow artists such as Portinari and Segall. She soon found her own unique style of painting and used it to depict various facets of Brazil: daily life, workers, folk festivals, Afro-Brazilian and Catholic religiosity, and landscapes. Beginning in the 1950s, she showed increasing interest in the sources of folk culture. For several months in 1954 and 1955, the artist worked in Salvador de Bahia, where she studied Afro-Brazilian culture, which she understood to be a fundamental component of the country’s identity. Afro-Brazilian religious rituals, especially representations of Candomblé Orishas (deities), served as a motif. In contrast to the first generation of modern artists, she lived in the environments in question and was involved in the cultures that she painted.