Gustavo Nazareno

Gustavo Nazareno was born in 1994 in Três Pontas, Brazil and currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. The main focus in his work is the orisha Exú, the orisha of human qualities. Another theme that gains strength in his paintings is the African Diaspora in Brazilian religiosity and the pantheon of Yoruba orishas in Candomblé and Umbanda. Through paintings and drawings in oil and charcoal, the artist develops a body of work in which the portrait takes on another dimension in the pictorial context. The contrast between the dark colours of the skins and his characters, many of them created from fables written by the artist himself, and the opaque background in light tones, the outlined contour of the figures manifests the precise technique refined by the artist throughout his young career, but which absorbs an entire study of human anatomy in research that he has been developing on his own from a very early age.

His solo exhibitions include ‘Bará’ at Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães (2024), ‘Bará’ at Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araújo (2023), ‘Fables on Exu’ at Gallery 1957 (2021) and was included in Gallery 1957’s group exhibition ‘Collective Reflections: Contemporary African & Diasporic Expressions of A New Vanguard’ in Accra, Ghana (2020). In the spring of 2026, he will have a solo exhibition curated by Danny Dunson at The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center in Chicago, Illinois, USA.