Elvira Freitas Lira

Elvira Freitas Lira, born in Arcoverde (PE), has been a self-taught painter since childhood. She lived in Arcoverde until she was 14, then in Olinda, until she moved to São Paulo at the age of 19. Today she works between the Southeast and the Northeast. She has participated in 3 group exhibitions, one of them at the Murilo La Greca museum in Recife in 2022. In April 2023, she held her first solo exhibition in Belo Horizonte.

The artist’s work addresses the familiar situations of the contemporary female universe through painting. She portrays dualities that permeate the experience of being a woman in the world, exploring both the sweetness and the violence present in this experience. In addition to this universal approach, her work has the particularity of being influenced by popular culture in the Northeast, resulting in a kind of “sertaneja POP”. Elvira works mainly with acrylic and oil painting, and has been exploring other areas such as literature, by writing poems.

Since she was a child, Elvira has found in painting an essential form of entertainment. However, her career took a new turn when she arrived in São Paulo in 2018, where she began to fully explore her daily contact with the making of this art, working as a painting assistant and producing canvases to sell. Her work is the result of an independent and authorial repertoire, combining strange and natural symbolic elements, many of which come from pop and mass culture. She transforms the pictorial space into an open field for political debate, always with an orientation centered on the feminine.