SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Jessica Silverman is presenting the first US solo show of Brazilian artist Ana Elisa Egreja, “The Flight of Color,” on view from July 16 to September 3, 2026. In 15 new oil paintings, Egreja transforms the everyday into the subtly miraculous. Working at life size, the artist fills domestic interiors with wild animals, flora, and foods drawn from her life in São Paulo. With intense colors and precise brushwork, her paintings bridge realms conventionally kept apart: the native and the imported, the sacred and the commercial, the sublime and the absurd. Her scenes are not surreal but magic realist; as she explains, they are “improbable, but not impossible.”
Egreja describes herself as a “contemporary archaeologist.” Drawn to everyday objects that carry strong cultural identity or evoke shared memories, she uses the still life to preserve the collective consciousness in time. She catalogs what captivates her—from furniture to food packaging—and recombines them into richly symbolic compositions, staging arrangements of foods, flowers, textiles, and found objects. Egreja builds on Dutch still life traditions, while embracing the freedom of collage.
Egreja uses the sunset's palette of burning oranges, deep reds, and saturated purples as a chromatic framework throughout the exhibition. In Interior with Five Cats at Sunset (2026), black domestic cats stretch across a curved, dragon-patterned sofa with authority, as if the room belongs to them. A real beaded curtain hovers over the canvas, setting illusion and material reality in tension. In another painting, Interior with a Jaguar and Sun Conures (2026), a large wild feline sprawls across an Art Nouveau couch while small parrots fly overhead. Drawing on animals from the artist's South American surroundings, both paintings imagine domestic interiors as wildernesses, where the boundaries between house and habitat dissolve.
This sensibility is vividly expressed in the large-scale painting Red Table with Chinoiserie, Macaws, and Parrots (2026). Scarlet macaws descend on a table heaped with watermelons, cucumbers, pomegranates, kiwis, cheese, and cans of Guaraná. The exotic Asian backdrop extends the painting’s dense network of visual and cultural references. For the artist, birds symbolize movement across borders, connecting distant places through migration and exchange. Throughout the composition, Egreja demonstrates remarkable dexterity in depicting materials, capturing the softness of feathers, the sheen of silk, and the varied textures of fruit and packaging with equal precision. As colors and forms ricochet across the surface, the painting rewards sustained looking, allowing patterns to emerge from its lush complexity.
Egreja further expands painting's relationship to physical reality by introducing materials that extend beyond the painted surface. In Window with Parrots and a Golden Sky (2026), 24-karat gold leaf transforms a São Paulo window into a luminous portal. Elsewhere, the inclusion of fabric marks a new development in the artist's practice. In Still Life with Floral Fabric (2026), a scarlet tanager perches atop a heap of bell peppers and tomatoes arranged on flower-patterned cloth incorporated directly into the canvas. By juxtaposing meticulously rendered forms with physical materials, Egreja playfully blurs the border between representation and reality.
The sunset motif extends into a suite of six closely cropped still lives, each centered on a single hue from the dusk’s spectrum. Purple Still Life (Sunset) (2026) arranges eggplants, purple cabbage, grapes, and blue beads shaped like scarab beetles against a gold-leaf backdrop. Restricting her palette to near monochrome, Egreja finds difference within sameness, assembling scenes in which disparate elements coexist with uncanny coherence.
Ana Elisa Egreja (b. 1983, São Paulo, Brazil) received her BFA from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado, São Paulo. Egreja has previously enjoyed institutional solo exhibitions at Direktorenhaus, Berlin; Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil; Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo; and Sesc Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; The Bomb Factory, London; Palazzo Coardi di Carpeneto, Turin; Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, CA; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Somerset House, London; and Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo, among many others. Her work is held in the collections of Deji Art Museum, China; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy; Franks-Suss Collection, UK; Kistefos Museum, Norway; Museu de Arte do Rio, Brazil; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia; Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Brazil; and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Egreja lives and works in São Paulo and is represented by Almeida & Dale.
