Paintings
Paintings by Chico da Silva and the Pirambu School, in gouache and acrylic, catalogued in the João Cunha Collection, Fortaleza, Brazil. Every work opens in high resolution.
From the early 1960s Chico da Silva worked with a circle of young painters at his house in Pirambu, a seaside neighborhood of Fortaleza. The group became known as the Escola do Pirambu, the Pirambu School. The paintings here run from his gouaches and acrylics of the late 1960s and 1970s to the canvases his disciples painted in the decades after his death.
Chico da Silva
Roosters, dragons, fish and fantastic birds, in gouache and acrylic, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
Signed in the master’s lifetime
Maria Augusta, the Girl Who Signed →The arrangement in Pirambu was that Chico da Silva signed. A canvas from those years carrying a disciple’s own name is rare, and it belongs to whoever had left the workshop and was selling on their own account.
The Pirambu revival
The Instituto Oboé and the Pirambu Revival →Two decades after Chico da Silva’s death, the Instituto Cultural Oboé, a finance house in Fortaleza with a gallery of its own, brought his disciples back to the canvas: Babá, Claudionor and Gerardo da Silva. Most of these acrylics carry a double attribution, Chico da Silva by the painter who made them.
Ivan de Assis on his own
Ivan de Assis, the Cinema in the Bestiary →Ivan de Assis drew for Chico da Silva from the first workshop in Pirambu and began signing his own name in the late 1970s. This canvas, painted in 2000, three years before he died, is the one work here in which a painter of the circle leaves the bestiary behind: figures, fruit and a basin, in a manner of his own.
Garcia today
Garcia, the Last Disciple →Garcia is the last painter of the original Pirambu circle still alive and still at work. He learned beside Chico da Silva in the 1960s and stayed inside his manner. These canvases are from 2024 and 2025, the most recent paintings in the collection.
