Art often finds people in the most unexpected ways: as an illumination, a call, or a sudden rediscovery of a symbolic world that has always existed within them. This is especially true for those who weren’t exposed to art early in life and received no formal training. Such is the case with Brazilian self-taught artist Larissa de Souza, who discovered art while working at an art supply store after a humble, and in many ways challenging, upbringing. “I learned about materials, techniques, and I met some artists. It was a good experience for me,” De Souza recalls, speaking with Observer on the occasion of her second solo exhibition, “Phenomenal,” on view at Albertz Benda in New York through February 14, 2026.
A raw, unrestrained sense of creative discovery animates her work and her wildly powerful symbolic universe. In her paintings, De Souza channels personal memories and an ever-expanding imaginative world through unfiltered experimentation with materials, colors and forms, eschewing traditional painting canon and revealing an instinctive, seemingly boundless capacity for world-building.
De Souza grew up in a Catholic family, but her mother’s faith was never strictly doctrinal. Instead, it embodied a hybrid spirituality that freely interwove Catholicism with Yoruba traditions and ancestral Afro-Brazilian belief systems. This layered spiritual inheritance emerges clearly in the dense syncretic mythopoiesis that animates her paintings, where personal iconography expands into a broader symbolic universe shaped by Afro-Caribbean spirituality, Santería, Catholic imagery and Brazilian folklore. “I feel that this sense of spirituality comes through in my work. It’s a constant presence, but at the same time, the work is very autobiographical,” she explains.
At the core of De Souza’s practice is an exploration of her experience as an Afro-Brazilian woman continually confronting memory, ancestry and womanhood. Her paintings quietly expose dynamics of power, visibility and exploitation that her mother, grandmother and an entire lineage of women have endured before her, tracing the persistence of racial and gendered bias in Brazilian society.
Looking closely at these works, many elements appear rooted in the artist’s upbringing, surfacing as fragments of personal history woven into each composition. “I feel as though I’m collecting pieces—moments, emotions, memories—that come together through the work,” she says.
The female figures inhabiting her paintings remain intimately tied to her family and herself. At times, they function as alter egos; at others, they emerge as relatives or inherited stories. “Sometimes the works come from stories I’ve heard and absorbed, which then find their way into my paintings. In the end, I think it’s all part of myself, filtered through memory and imagination,” De Souza reflects.
One work in particular, Baby’s Layette (2025), looks directly at her mother’s experience of raising her as a single parent. “When she was pregnant with me, she went alone to the hospital. No one visited her. She had just been abandoned by my father, and that experience marked her deeply,” De Souza shares, noting how this is a tragically common story in Brazil, especially among Black women. That history—its emotional and structural violence—becomes part of the painting. “In a way, my mother is here. It’s like looking back, or imagining how my mother might have seen me, or drawn me.”
De Souza’s paintings emerge from an urgency to claim and process these long-repressed memories—working through generational trauma and imagining alternatives. “When something happens, and it makes me uncomfortable, I feel the need to paint; it’s almost necessary. That’s how this work feels,” she says.
The title of the exhibition draws directly from Maya Angelou’s poem “Phenomenal Woman,” reinforcing an insistence on the dignity of presence and the assertion of a feminine, matriarchal energy that has long been repressed or contained, yet remains a primordial source of healing, fecundity and life. “It’s the fire in my eyes, and the flash of my teeth. The swing in my waist, and the joy in my feet. I’m a woman, phenomenally,” it reads. “Phenomenal woman, that’s me.”
Echoing the act of assertion in the poem, painting is, for De Souza, a means of claiming space for these stories and restoring dignity to experiences that demand to be remembered and honored. Her art functions as a portal, connecting her to the women who came before her and to a matriarchal lineage that continues to shape her sense of self.
In her new works, De Souza adopts an increasingly multi-material approach, freely combining acrylic and oil with collage, fabric, found objects, embroidery and resin frames. Raised and textured elements hover between image and object, collapsing distinctions between painting, craft and assemblage. “It feels closer to artisanal practice, which I enjoy,” she says. “I like going to different kinds of stores—not just art supply shops, but also construction and craft stores—to find materials. I like to experiment.” The act of building images through layered materials becomes a form of embodied perception, guided by intuition rather than predetermined outcomes.
Her visual language carries a distinctly archetypal quality, in which personal expression instinctively opens onto timeless symbolic forms. De Souza confirms that her process is largely intuitive: she begins with a spontaneous drawing, allowing figures to emerge gradually and assert their own agency until they shape the painting’s narrative and symbolic structure. Her figures often appear suspended in a liminal state, hovering between the earthly and the subconscious, between lived reality and a more magical, interior realm.
Magic runs through the work—but not as escapism or mysticism detached from reality. Rather, it is the imaginative force itself, the human capacity to create, reframe and envision worlds beyond trauma and constraint. “I speak about magic, but not magic as something mystical or external,” De Souza explains. “It’s the kind of magic humans create themselves. The magic we make, shape and inhabit.” Her work thrives within this tension—between logic and belief, reason and imagination—and within the shifting projections of how others look, interpret and assign meaning.
In Still, I Rise (2025), a magician’s assistant is frozen mid-sawing, her body split between two boxes on a checkered stage. The saw floats without a hand, fruit spills outward, and a white dove rises into light—transforming a spectacle of illusion and control into one of self-possession, self-assertion and transcendence.
By translating personal and generational wounds into mythic transposition through a ritualized, intuitive process of image-making, De Souza allows those experiences to be processed, expanded and shared. Domestic materials—each carrying its own histories of use, care, suffering and grief—anchor the fantastical in the everyday, revealing how the extraordinary can emerge from ordinary life.
Ultimately, De Souza’s painting can be understood less as self-expression than as a response to initiation through trauma—an imaginative act that arises when traditional rites of passage are absent, interrupted or denied. Storytelling and image-making become essential acts of repair, not aimed at resolving biography but at restoring the soul.
Her paintings operate as vessels through which personal suffering is carried into a broader symbolic field, where wounds are granted meaning rather than explanation, and imagination acts as a vital force capable of rethreading broken narratives into a living myth. Each work becomes a gesture of repair and reimagination, asserting art’s capacity not only to bear witness but to build worlds in which survival, dignity and transformation coexist.
Balancing memory and imagination, autobiography and folklore, earthly experience and mythic resonance, De Souza has instinctively found in art a living, mythic language of repair—capable of carrying personal and familial history beyond the limits of intergenerational trauma. Her paintings do not seek resolution so much as meaning, transforming lived experience into shared symbols that echo across generations. In this sense, her work participates in a deeper mythic function—returning individual stories to the larger patterns of the human journey, allowing pain, endurance and imagination a place within a wider, connective cosmic order.
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