Lisson Gallery Now Represents Brazilian Artist Dalton Paula

Lisson Gallery will now represent Brazilian artist Dalton Paula, who is known for his paintings that depict important Black historical figures who have been overlooked until recently. Paula will have his first show with Lisson this September in New York.

Lisson will represent Paula alongside his two Brazilian galleries, Martins&Montero, which has locations in São Paulo and Brussles, and Cerrado Galeria de Arte in Brasilia and Goiânia. (He was previously represented in New York by Alexander and Bonin, which closed in early 2024.)

Paula is one of Brazil’s most closely watched artists, having had three separate solo shows in the country in 2022, at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, and Instituto Inclusartiz in Rio de Janeiro. He has been included in important group shows like the 2024 Venice Biennale, the 2018 New Museum Triennial, the 2016 Bienal de São Paulo, and the traveling exhibition “Afro-Atlantic Histories,” which debuted at MASP in 2018 and then traveled to several US museums.

Working across painting, photography, video, performance, and installation, Paula is perhaps best known for the two paintings he was commissioned to make for “Afro-Atlantic Histories” at MASP. Those portraits depict João De Deus Nascimento and Zeferina, two leaders of different freedom movements for enslaved people in Brazil in the 1790s and 1826, respectively.

“The big challenge is that these characters from history don’t have portraits,” Paula told ARTnews. “Nobody know how they were. And my challenge was to create a face, an image for these characters. I thought about how this character would like to be represented today.”

He consulted various historical photographs of Black people from the 19th century to create these portraits, setting them against a blue-green background as a nod to the photo-paintings he had consulted. (His portrait of Zeferina was featured on the cover of the English version of the exhibition catalog.) Since the exhibition, Paula has continued making more portraits of other important Black historical figures whose faces have been lost to the historical record. Now, the series numbers over 100 paintings.

He added, “For me, these paintings are really important because they are a document for a new generation.”

Paula has also expanded his painting practice into large-scale installations, like his series “Tobacco Route,” which he made for the 2016 Bienal de São Paulo. On various orange ceramic bowls, he painted various scenes of the lives of Black people who had worked tobacco plantations in both Brazil and Cuba, as this form of documentation of their everyday experiences don’t exist.

Drawing from tobacco advertisements and archival records like employee files, he painted these characters all wearing white, a nod to the medicinal proprieties of tobacco that had been prized by Indigenous people. “I made the Black people the protagonists of this history,” Paula said of the series. By placing them into bowls and close to the ground, he sees them as an offering.

In addition to his art practice, Paula has also established two art centers in his hometown of Goiânia. Established in 2020, Sertão Negro is a 75,000-square-foot complex that serves as an art school, residency, studio, kitchen, and garden for the community, hosting classes, workshops, film screenings, and more. Paula recently founded Jatobá Nascente, which gives six emerging artists shared studio space and an individual plot of land to build a home. Paula was inspired by Brazil’s former quilombos, settlements founded by formerly enslaved Black Brazilians, like Zeferina.  

“Since I first encountered Dalton’s work in São Paulo about 10 years ago I was captivated,” Lisson CEO Alex Logsdail said in a statement. “He has an innate ability to capture the soul of a subject with an immediacy that stops you in your tracks. Having visited his Sertão Negro Studio and School of Arts on the outskirts of Goiânia it was eye-opening to understand his greater mission to provide an educational and community platform to a region that has historically lacked any such resource.”

Speaking of both his practice and Sertão Negro, Paula said that it’s his effort to not only to honor all those who came before him, both revolutionaries and artists, but also to give back to his community.

“I’m so proud, and I’m so happy, because for me, it’s very special moment,” he said. “Many people came before me, and for these people, there were many hardships. Today, I have this opportunity to continue this mission to continue to give my contribution for the Black community, for the new generation. The idea is for more people have access to this imagery, these concepts, these questions, these issues.”