thumb|Photograph of Nery
Ismael Nery (October 9, 1900 – April 6, 1934) was a Brazilian artist. His iconic work is Autorretrato, 1927 (Autorretrato Rio/Paris), a surrealist painting commonly compared to the Green Violinist of Marc Chagall and now in São Paulo Museum of Art.
thumbnail|Ismael Nery, self-portrait|alt=|left
Life
Nery was born in 1900 in Belém, Pará, of Dutch, Native-Brazilian, and African ancestry. His family settled in 1909 in Rio de Janeiro. In 1915, he began studies the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (National School of Fine Arts). He traveled to Europe in 1920, and attended the Académie Julian in Paris. Back in Brazil, he worked in the architecture section of the National Heritage service at the Ministry of Finance, where he became friends with the poet Murilo Mendes. Nery created numerous paintings, wrote many poems and also helped design Brazil's National Patrimony of the Treasury department. In 1922, he married a poet, Adalgisa Nery. In this period, he produced works with an expressionist tendency.
His favorite themes are always linked to the human figure: portraits, self-portraits and nudes. He is not interested in national, indigenous and Afro-Brazilian themes. It diversifies the techniques used. He is also a scenographer. In 1929, he had two solo exhibitions, in Belém and Rio de Janeiro. The welcome disappoints him. He also participates in a group exhibition of Brazilian painting in New York.
Ismael Nery's work was forgotten by the public and critics until the 1960s, when his name was inscribed on the Biennale of São Paulo, In the room devoted to surrealism and fantastic art. His works were also exhibited in the <abbr>10th</abbr> Biennale. In 1966 in Rio de Janeiro, and in 1984, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (Ismael Nery Retrospective - 50 years later), two retrospectives of his creations were presented.