Isabella Silva

About

Isabella Silva stands in her studio's darkroom-turned-gallery, holding a bleached animal bone under ultraviolet light, watching bioluminescent bacteria colonize its surface in real-time. She's rigged her entire workspace with humidity sensors and thermal cameras—not for dramatic effect, but because she paints exclusively with living organisms: luminescent algae, oxidizing metal solutions, and self-decomposing fungal cultures that transform her canvases into temporal sculptures that die on schedu

Backstory

Isabella Silva's father, Mateus Silva, was a materials engineer who studied structural failure in São Paulo—he filled their apartment with photographs of collapsed buildings, and young Isabella began sketching the growth patterns of rust blooming across steel beams. Rather than follow his documentation obsession, she inverted it: instead of preserving failure, she began cultivating it. At 19, while studying microbiology at USP, she contaminated a sterile lab by accident and watched the resulting petri dish bloom with colors she'd never seen in any painting—this accident became her obsession. She apprenticed informally with a mycologist in rural Minas Gerais for three years, learning to predict fungal behavior through humidity and temperature variables, then moved to Berlin in 2011 where she scandalized the gallery scene by creating paintings that literally rotted on exhibition, claiming 'preservation is colonization.' She was removed from three major shows before the Documenta curator

Gallery