The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024: Paula Siebra
In Paula Siebra’s painting Ruína sobre uma duna (Ruin on a dune) (2022), a modest colonial church with white-washed walls straddles a sun-flecked sandbank. The compactness of the composition, and the solitude of the architectural ruin—depicted against a landscape emptied out of other distinguishable markers except for faint, brittle grass and billowy clouds—is characteristic of Siebra’s work.
In carefully layered oil and tempera paintings, the artist builds a visual vocabulary drawing on the clay-tinged color palettes, sandy topographies, and palpable sense of seclusion found in her native coastal state of Ceará, Brazil. Often, the scenes are familiar, but Siebra brings to them a certainty in the expressive potential of her medium. “I believe that painting renews itself constantly,” she said during an interview conducted by video call. “I may be making yet another nocturnal landscape, but it is mine, and in this sense, it is unique and singular.”
Portrait of Paula Siebra by Guilherme Freire, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
Born in Fortaleza in 1998, Siebra is among the youngest artists to emerge on the Brazilian contemporary art scene in recent years. She first exhibited in 2017 at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, where she also studied painting at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, graduating with her undergraduate degree in painting in 2020. Since then, she has participated in group exhibitions internationally and mounted solo shows at Mendes Wood DM, which represents her, in São Paulo, New York, and Brussels.
In Siebra’s exhibitions, folk art traditions often appear within and alongside her work, reflecting what she has called “a great tenderness for objects.” Even as her international profile has risen, Siebra remains focused on the material of everyday life.
Paula Siebra, Farol do beberibe, 2023. Courtesy of Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
Siebra’s tenderness for objects permeates her somber, muted still-life Prateleira dos fundos (Back shelf) (2021), which depicts rows of porcelain cups and a coffee and milk jug. Despite the painting’s solemnity, Siebra conveys a spiritual feeling of hushed intimacy and calm. Her work with low-intensity light shows that she has absorbed prodigiously the lessons acquired from other painters: pre-Renaissance artists such as Giotto in the attention to color and delicate rendering of portrait figures; Balthus in his deep feeling for objects; Giorgio Morandi in the striking ability to transmit aura with arrangements of humble items; and early Lucian Freud in his surrealistic stage, in which reality met the uncanny.
“The solemnity in Morandi and Balthus, in particular, has always interested me, not for its sentimentality, but instead because of how simple objects can resonate with such great, silent poetry,” Siebra said.
A sense of time passing, the wear and tear of usage, and the affective memory vested in ordinary objects and moments are also crucial to Siebra. “Noites de cetim” (“Satin Nights”), her 2022 solo show at Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo, addressed these themes directly. Siebra lifted the show’s title from a lyric by Amelinha, a singer from Ceará: “I still harbor inside me the satin nights, ivory moon, and the days filled with sun.”
“I always get goosebumps when I hear the lyrics,” Siebra said. “This whole thing about memory resonates with me deeply.”
Siebra’s small-scale paintings register primarily the hours of dusk, when dunes appear red and orange, velvety shadows linger over the sea, and the lights of houses twinkle faintly in the semi-dark. In this evocative setting, even the simplest objects carry the weight of past gestures and moments. For example, the tiny white tray laid out with a knife and a nicked apple in Bandeja com maça e faca (Tray with an apple and knife) (2022) gives the impression of suspended, or abandoned, action—a flickering reminiscence of repose.
Siebra discovered painting early in life. Encouraged by her mother to participate in art activities, she was already drawing seriously at age 11, and recognized her passion for painting at 15. Compared to the art hubs of Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, Fortaleza had little to offer in terms of artistic education. Nevertheless, it instilled in Siebra a great faith in the singularity of the sparsely populated spaces and scenery that now frequently appear in her work.
Paula Siebra, Pau de fita, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
She is highly attuned to the emotional resonance of this landscape: “I call it the geography of solitude,” she explained. “Since our landscape is very dry, both on the coast and inland, its elements tend to be very isolated from each other. You find a single palm tree, for instance, in the midst of a large white area, or inland, a single house and a single tree, in the vast red expanse.”
Siebra works in oil painting and tempera, using techniques that involve intensive layering. She credits her accumulative method, as well as her fascination with rusty earth tones, to the artisanal tradition of silicogravura, or silicon etching. A practice found throughout Ceará and the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Norte, silicogravura entails depositing layers of colorful sands into glass bottles to create images of the local coastline.
Paula Siebra, installation view of “O Soar das Horas” at Nieuwe Gentweg 21, 2021. Photo by Kristien Daem. Courtesy of Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
Paula Siebra, Merenda com suspiros (Snack with meringue cookies), 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
Siebra, who started out after art school as an assistant to a ceramist, has long been fascinated with ceramics and regional popular art. Enrolled in a master’s program in art at the Federal University of Ceará, she is currently writing a thesis on silicogravura’s forms and poetics. This year, she participated in “Lembrança de algum lugar” (“Remembrance of somewhere”), a group exhibition in Fortaleza that included silicogravura artists. The show’s highlights included the documentary De cor e areia (Of color and sand) (2022), which Siebra had made about them.
Passionate about things regional and quotidian, Siebra takes the periphery not only as a setting, but also as a conceptual guide. Fittingly, the title of her second solo show at Mendes Wood DM was “Arrebalde,” meaning “something found at the edge, off center, a periphery.” As a formal principle, the term applies to Siebra’s sometimes surprising framing and cropping, which flatten out the pictorial frame, decentering objects. On a more metaphysical level, it also means searching for beauty in the mundane.
“I seek the truth not in the great things in life, but the things that we do each day,” Siebra said. “When I talk about the periphery, I reaffirm the things that affect us most in our daily life: the plate with a meal on the table, the covers to slide under, the clothes laid out on the bed.…It’s very tempting to think of the periphery as consisting of insignificant things, but painting has the power to show us anew what’s really significant. Painting should be very quotidian in our life, a vital necessity.”
The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024
The Artsy Vanguard is our annual feature recognizing the most promising artists working today. The sixth edition of The Artsy Vanguard features 10 rising talents from across the globe who are poised to become the next great leaders of contemporary art. Explore more of The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024 and browse works by the artists.
Header: Paula Siebra, from left to right: “Farol do beberibe,” 2023; “Hora dourada,” 2022; “Pau de fita,” 2021. All courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
