Ismael Nery (b. 1900, Belém do Pará, Brazil; d. 1934, Rio de Janeiro) was the mystical artist of Brazilian modernism. For him, art was a means to express his spiritual and philosophical restlessness. His project of the disintegration of the pictorial body arose from the desire to find the essence of the form through the abstraction of time and space. The androgyny that appears in his art represents the notion of divine androgyny: the idea that in the beginning males and females were one, and that perfection arises from such totality of being.