Untitled

UntitledChico da Silva · 1971 · Acrylic on canvas
A large curving serpent-bird with heart-spotted wings against a bright yellow ground. Untitled, Chico da Silva, 1971, acrylic on canvas.
Download image

High-resolution viewer. Use the arrow keys to pan, plus and minus to zoom.

Description for blind and low-vision visitors

A horizontal painting set on a brilliant yellow ground with mauve-gray corners at upper left and lower left. A large fantastical creature, part bird and part serpent, arcs across the composition. Its long patterned neck sweeps from the lower left up and around to a red crested head at center-left, with a single eye and a thin curving beak. The body fans out to the right into broad wings filled with rows of red and pink hearts outlined in pale green. A long tail curls down to the lower center and ends in a band of concentric-circle eye-spots above a row of purple triangular points along the lower edge. Dark spiky clawed forms and a fringe of fine radiating lines appear at the lower center and lower right. The surface throughout is dense with dots, stripes, scrolls and concentric rings in red, blue, purple, orange and green.

Artist
Chico da Silva
Year
1971
Technique
Acrylic on canvas
Support
Canvas
Dimensions
57 x 71 cm
Collection
João Cunha Collection
Signature
FDZILVA, lower left (reversed S)
Photo
Eric Keki
Inventory no.
JCC-038

The signature

Detail of the painted signature: «FDZILVA»
The canvas is signed “FDZILVA”, in the lower left corner. The S is reversed, so it reads as the artist's usual signature, “F. D. Silva”. Beside it sits the painter's thumbprint.

Provenance

  1. The artist, Fortaleza, 1971
  2. Lucien Finkelstein, private collection
  3. Museu Internacional de Arte Naïf do Brasil (MIAN)
  4. João Cunha Collection

How to credit

Photographs free to reuse, with credit (CC BY 4.0)

Chico da Silva, “Untitled” (1971). Photo: Eric Keki, João Cunha Collection, CC BY 4.0. https://chicodasilva.org/id/jcc-038

The license covers the photograph, not the painting.

Also on Wikimedia

For IIIF viewers