Jeanine Brito

Brito paints operatic tableaux, with her likeness woven throughout as the central character. Her use of dramatic reds, whites, and pinks creates a narrative reminiscent of blood-soaked fairy tales. Brito, who was born in Germany and grew up in Calgary, started to paint during the pandemic, quitting her job to focus on art full time. The move paid off: her work was discovered via Instagram by a top gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, and Bucharest. 

I found Brito’s work on Instagram and then I went to one of her shows in New York at the Nicodim Gallery. She’s a German-born artist currently living in Montreal, and her paintings are so captivating – spooky, beautiful, feminine and dreamlike. 

Inspired by Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the show brings together 14 artists from around the world exploring ideas of identity, memory, and time.

Self-taught painter Jeanine Brito depicts feminine sacrifice through technicolor vibrancy in her current show The Grumpy Girls, now showing at Nicodim Gallery in New York. The exhibition reimagines and pays homage to classical films such as The Red Shoes (1948) and Tales of Hoffman (1951) through striking self-portraiture that pulls the curtain behind desire and evocative gore in this surrealist retelling of a one woman show. Brito is caught in a blood red fever dream through multiple feminal archetypes that teeter the line between the eros of girlish longing and the identity disruption of motherhood.

Brito ran an online fashion magazine before posting her fairy tale–inspired painted creations on Instagram. They were an instant hit.

Toronto-based artist Jeanine Brito (b. 1993) is telling her own fairy tales in bold visions of red and pink paint.

The artist, who was born in Mainz, Germany, and raised in Toronto, recently held her first U.S. solo exhibition, “The Invitation: A Fairytale by Jeanine Brito,” at Nicodim Gallery’s Los Angeles space—a show that felt like falling into a picture book. Inspired by the peculiar combination of brutality and beauty found in the pages of Hans Christian Andersen and Grimm’s children’s stories, Brito conceived of the exhibition as a space to construct her very own fairy tale—one that was dark, visceral, and glamorously theatrical at once.

To mark the beginning of a new chapter at Nina Ricci with Harris Reed at the helm, the French fashion house commissioned three paintings reinterpreting the brand’s classic iconography by German artist Jeanine Brito. Archival Nina Ricci symbols —including apples, flowers and doves— took on dreamy new appearances in buttery shades of pink and blue. Several of the collection’s prints and promotional images were also adapted from Brito’s custom series.