Artists Julia Isídrez, from Paraguay, and Maria Lira Marques, from Brazil, will feature jointly in a presentation by Gomide&Co at Independent 20th Century this September. For Thiago Gomide, the founder of the São Paulo-based gallery, it is a fitting pairing that reveals striking parallels between their respective practices in ceramics and deep roots in their home communities.
Both Isídrez and Marques produce works that are profoundly connected to the nature and culture of their native regions, where the spiritual and artmaking practices of Indigenous and African populations have been syncretized with European customs for centuries. Combining traditional and contemporary elements, local materials and a dreamlike visual language, they learned their craft from the generations who came before them.
According to Gomide, who has spent time with the artists in their studios, they are doing all this in places “where nature doesn’t give much.” These arid landscapes would be virtually uninhabitable were it not for the rivers that run through them. Ceramics are a necessary lifeline for many in the community “because that is what they can do with what they have around them—which is fire, water, and dirt.”
Julia Isídrez, Cantaro con relieve, 1999, ceramics, 21 1/2 x 17 1/2 x 18 1/2 in., courtesy Gomide&Co
A fourth-generation Guaraní ceramicist, Isídrez was born in 1967 in Itá, a colonial town nicknamed the “capital of ceramics,” where Jesuit missionaries settled in the 17th century. She learned the craft from her late mother, Juana Marta Rodas, who was celebrated as a national treasure in her lifetime (and had been taught by her own mother). Their works are often exhibited side by side, as they appear in Adriano Pedrosa’s 60th Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere.
Using ancestral firing and hand-modeling techniques, Isídrez works the black clay of the Paraná River into her signature anthropomorphic forms. Her work honors the generations of ceramicists who preceded her and her mother but were excluded from the art circuit, instead selling their creations at street fairs in Itá and other local marketplaces.
Julia Isídrez, Alonsito (Diseño de Juana Marta), 2017, ceramics, 29 1/2 x ø 15 1/2 in., Courtesy Gomide&Co
Julia Isídrez, Oveja (Diseño de Juana Marta), 2023, ceramics, 12 x 16 x 17 in., Courtesy Gomide&Co
Maria Lira Marques, Untitled, 1999, Natural pigments on paper, 27 x 19 1/2 in., Courtesy Gomide&Co
Maria Lira Marques, Untitled, Late 1990's - Early 2000's, Natural pigments on paper, 13 x 17 1/2 in., Courtesy Gomide&Co
Marques, of Maxakali and Quilombo descent, was born in 1945 in Araçuaí, a town in the Jequitinhonha River Valley in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state, where destructive open-pit mines have been encroaching on Indigenous land since the 17th century. Her earliest sculptures were made with leftover beeswax from her father’s shoe repair business, which she held near a fire and hand-molded. She later learned ceramics from her mother, Odília Borges Nogueira, an untrained artist who produced Christmas nativity scenes using mud from the Araçuaí River.
Marques has said that she wanted her ceramics to capture the distinct traces of Black and Indigenous people’s faces. She stopped working in the medium in the 1990s, when she developed arthritis in both arms and was no longer able to procure materials and fire pieces. Turning to painting with natural pigments, animal forms emerged in her work, which the artist has called Meus bichos do sertão, “my animals from the backlands.” The zoomorphic figures—such as a fish with legs, or a chicken with a long tail—come “from my own head,” the artist has said, and the memories of her region.
Portrait of Julia Isídrez, courtesy Gomide&Co, São Paulo.
Although Marques and Isídrez have risen to national and international acclaim, both still reside in their hometowns and work to support and preserve the local arts ecosystems. In 2022 Isídrez founded a museum in her and mother’s names that also promotes the work of other ceramicists, including several she has mentored in her workshop in Itá. Marques, meanwhile, founded the Museum of Araçuaí in 2010 alongside her longtime collaborator, Francisco “Xico” van der Poel, a Dutch priest who extensively researched local folk culture and religious practices.
“Marques and Xico realized that some centuries-old traditions in the arts, music, and literature were dying because the younger generations were not particularly interested in them,” Gomide explains. “They spent around 20 years cataloging the religious parties, costumes, street parades, and art of Araçuaí, pairing their research with Marques’ own work.”
Portrait of Maria Lira Marques, courtesy Gomide&Co, São Paulo
Like the cultural traditions they have stewarded so carefully, both Marques and Isídrez were once “undervalued” until a recent surge in interest in artists and art forms from the Global South. Beyond Independent 20th Century, Isídrez recently held her first solo exhibition in the United States at Kasmin Gallery in New York, and she will be featured in the 14th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, next year. Marques is the subject of a forthcoming monograph and will be included in the next survey of Brazilian contemporary art at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, opening in October.
“Seeing their work together is an incredible way to understand how these artists created so much with so little,” Gomide says. “I realized that these artists’ works should be just as valued as those of someone working in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro or New York, and have made it my mission to change that.”
Gabriella Angeleti is an arts and culture writer and editor based between Brooklyn and Rio de Janeiro. Her writing focuses on South American art, Indigenous art, art in the American high desert, archeological and cultural heritage conservation, and the intersection of art and the environment.
