June 11–August 30, 2026
A zebu stands by the gallery door, its head flung back to the heavens. The humped bovine, rendered in bronze and stylized into modernist curves, has reason to be pained. A closer look at Zebu (ca. 1952) reveals that Victor Brecheret (1894–1955) has inscribed the surface with three alligators: two attacking the poor beast’s flanks, a third crawling up the neck, going for jugular. It introduces a show of the Brazilian artist’s sculptures and sketches that is laced with questions of violence.
Nonhuman animals are central to this exhibition, as they were to the traditional Indigenous lifestyles that Brecheret sought to document in the mid-twentieth century—sincerely, if problematically. Nearby, a jaguar, Onça (1930), is sculpted in granite. The feline is shown padding, the slow movement suggested by the gentle stretching of its legs; the volume between the limbs and the animal’s undercarriage filled with recessed stone, as if it’s slinking past a rockface. There are oxen, anteaters, and horses. Exhibitions told “from the Indigenous perspective” have been an increasing presence in São Paulo’s museums over the past decade, but Brecheret comes from a different time, with different political mores, and (even allowing considerable controversy over whether he was born in Italy or São Paulo) with the colonial gaze.
Yet Brecheret has long been considered one of the great Brazilian modernists. He was friends with Mário de Andrade, a key figure in the epochal 1922 Modern Art Week, and exhibited at the first Bienal de São Paulo, in 1951. His formally innovative and arresting public sculptures dot the parks and streets of the city, and one has recently become a key figure in the culture wars. Around 160 feet long, Monument to the Bandeiras (commissioned in 1921 but only completed in 1954) is hard to miss outside Parque Ibirapuera, attracting attacks both physical and polemical. It shows a man on a horse leading a train of “flag-bearing” men (giving the work its title), some clearly identifiable as Indigenous, so presumably coerced or enslaved to “settle” the interior of Brazil.
If the exhibition at FIESP aims to placate Brecheret’s critics, as the show title suggests, it’s unlikely to succeed. Any broad revisionist history of the artist’s intentions cannot survive attention to the work (credit to the curators for not shying away from the condemning evidence). Take two bronze visions of the Virgin, placed in the same vitrine: Virgem Indigenia (ca. 1950) is barely recognisable as human, an abstract oblong lump with the barest of facial features and a severely fringed hairline scratched on the surface. What might be a lip plate breaks the form, while an engraved alligator crawls up the lower body. Next to this work stands the Virgem come Menino (Virgin with Child), from the same period. While Mary is not shown with anything approaching realism, her and the babe Christ’s details are intricately rendered, delicate in their bearing, breathing life into the bronze. While the former is a much more formally interesting work, the contrast in the artist’s approach is striking, and it doesn’t take a great theoretical leap to assume this reflects Brecheret's attitude to Indigenous versus European culture.
Acalanto de Bartira (1954) is a massive bronze of amorphous heads and breasts, the title telling us we are witness to a lullaby sung to Bartira, daughter of Tibiriçá, chief of the Tupiniquim people, and future wife of the first bandeirante and Portuguese founder of São Paulo. Yet there are also moments of astonishing beauty: Cabeça Indigena (ca. 1940s), a tiny terracotta bust of an Indigenous boy is jewellike and clearly created with devotion; the bronze Barca (1942) is remarkable in its play of scale, a vast canoe is pushed by four taught fishermen; Brecheret’s sketches lining the gallery walls are also full of life in their scenes of hunting and play, conveying the richness of Indigenous village experience.
The majority of this work was made after 1930, when Brecheret returned on a permanent basis from various stints in Paris—one early sculpture exemplifies his earlier practice: a gaudy gilt 1927 reclining figure, all classical pastiche. Back in Brazil, he displayed a newfound desire for a domestic modernism. A style that didn’t mimic the West, but had an identity of its own: Antropofagia, the “devouring” of European colonial culture that de Andrade called for (and which earned Brecheret his presence in Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 Venice Biennale).
The exhibition closes with three perfectly smooth boulders, which a sign reveals were found on the Praia dos Vacas, on the Atlantic shoreline of São Paulo state. Brecheret has carved each with hieroglyphic animals—a jaguar, a large fish, a curled-up deer—but they retain their rawness. They pull our focus to the artist’s material interests, and the fact the rest of the works here are also made from the pigments and organic matter of Brazilian land. Land makes its people, the work seems to hint; in turn, people and animals make the land and possess its spirit (literally, as some Indigenous cosmologies would have it).
This suggests a more generous reading of Brecheret’s legacy, including the Indigenous population in the Brazilian story during a period when they were otherwise shut out of its cultural imagination, incorporating their narrative when they weren’t afforded the right to tell it themselves. Within the artist’s demeaning paternalism was a respect for the motifs and culture of indigeneity that, albeit interpreted from a colonial perspective, became a foundation for Brazilian modernity: a modernism not forged in the ateliers of Europe, but the forests of South America.
