Maria Auxiliadora moved to São Paulo when she was a child. She quit school to work as a housekeeper in order to help make ends meet for her family of 18 siblings. Her mother was a craftswoman, and it was through her that Maria Auxiliadora had her first contact with art. At age 32 she began painting figures with homemade pigmented paste or a mixture of oil paint and hair, thus creating reliefs with real volume. Maria Auxiliadora depicted popular festivals, scenes of rituals and religious ceremonies both from the Catholicism and Candomblé. She often represented women with accentuated curves, giving enhanced shape to their bodies. In the 1970s, Auxiliadora became involved in the discussions of African culture and resistance of the group led by poet Solano Trindade (1908-1974) in Embu das Artes, a city in the Greater São Paulo region. Her first solo show at the Brazil-U.S. Institute in 1970 was the result of her participation in the Salão de São Bernardo do Campo [Salon of São Bernardo do Campo (in São Paulo State)] that same year. Beginning in 1973, she started to produce paintings that depicted aspects of her own battle with cancer (which led to her untimely death at age 39), including a series of self-portraits in which she appears in a wedding gown. Though her career was short, the artist showed her work in various countries abroad, including U.S., France, Germany and Switzerland. MASP has held two solo shows of the artist’s work (1981 and 2018) and has four of her paintings in its collection.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017
