Andrew Kreps Gallery opens a solo exhibition of Heitor dos Prazeres at 394 Broadway, New York, on 6 November 2026, running to 19 December. It is a rare New York outing for an artist who is a legend in Brazil and still little known to American audiences.

Dos Prazeres (1898-1966) was a painter, composer, costume designer and samba musician, a central figure in the cultural life of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-twentieth century. He helped found three of the city's oldest samba schools, including Mangueira and Portela, and his compositions, among them Vai Saudade from 1965, remain standards. As a painter he won third place at the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951 for Moenda, and his work entered the Museum of Modern Art in New York as early as the 1940s.

His paintings take Afro-Brazilian life as their subject: carnival processions, samba musicians and dancers, religious ceremonies, the favelas and capoeira, rendered with a rhythmic, dynamic quality that carries the music he lived by into the picture. Today his work sits in major collections including the Centre Pompidou, the Reina Sofía, MASP and the Museu Afro Brasil.

The show follows a wave of rediscovery. A major retrospective at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio in 2023 gathered more than 200 works, his paintings appeared in the 36th São Paulo Biennial in 2025, and Brazilian galleries presented him at Independent 20th Century in New York this September. The Kreps exhibition is the next step in that return.