Chico da Silva valuation

Chico da Silva (1910–1985) was born in Alto Tejo, in the Amazonian territory of Acre, to a mother from Ceará and a Peruvian father; 1910 is the year on his identity card, though researchers now place his birth around 1922. His family moved to Ceará and he settled in Fortaleza, where around 1937 he began drawing birds and other creatures on the whitewashed walls of fishermen's houses at Praia Formosa, using charcoal, chalk, brick and leaf pigments. The Swiss painter Jean-Pierre Chabloz found him in 1943, commissioned gouaches on paper and took the work to Europe. Self-taught, he painted dragons, flying fish, birds, snakes and roosters in flat, bright colour, first in gouache and then in tempera and acrylic and on canvas. From the 1960s he worked with assistants in a workshop in the Pirambu district, known as the Pirambu School. He received an honourable mention at the Venice Biennale in 1966, and his work is in the art museum of the Federal University of Ceará and the Centre Pompidou. Nottingham Contemporary held the first European institutional solo exhibition of his work in 2026.

His work is mostly gouache on paper or card, with some paintings in tempera or acrylic on canvas. Works from the Pirambu workshop were painted with assistants and signed with his name, and authorship has been questioned, so provenance matters: note where and when the work was acquired and any gallery or exhibition history. Gouache is sensitive to light and damp, so check for fading, staining and flaking paint.