{"id":1861038,"date":"2026-04-01T20:50:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T17:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1861038"},"modified":"2026-04-01T20:50:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T17:50:12","slug":"teresinha-soares-dead-brazilian-artist-of-erotic-inflected-art-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1861038","title":{"rendered":"Teresinha Soares Dead: Brazilian Artist of Erotic-Inflected Art Dies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tTeresinha Soares, the Brazilian artist whose paintings and installations from the 1960s and \u201970s challenged gendered-conventions of how women were both treated in Brazilian society and depicted throughout art history, died on March 31 in Belo Horizonte. She was 99 years old.<\/p>\n
\n\tShe had been hospitalized after breaking her femur and never recovered, according to her daughter, artist Valeska Soares, as reported by Brazilian newspaper Estado de Minas<\/em>. <\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cTeresinha Soares leaves a legacy that, in the present, keeps open investigations into desire, eroticism, and expression,\u201d the artist\u2019s gallery, Gomide & Co., wrote on Instagram, adding that her body of work \u201cmade a decisive contribution to discussions on the body, desire, and subjectivity in Brazilian art.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tA key figure of Brazil\u2019s New Figuration movement and at times associated with the country\u2019s New Objectivity movement, Teresinha Soares is best-known for her pared-down silhouettes of figures in eye-popping color. Soares\u2019s art has a certain eroticism to them, her women full-figured and sumptuous.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI consider the body as the axis of my poetics,\u201d she told Tate Modern in a 2015 interview. \u201cMy practice, considered avant-gardist at the time, continues to be contemporary because it focuses on all the issues that are still of concern today: the taboos of sex, male-female relationships, encounters and dis-encounters, women demanding respect within contemporary society, still fighting for rights and\u00a0freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tFor the era, her work was provocative for how it showed a woman unafraid to tackle women\u2019s sexuality and their oppression in a male-dominate society head-on. She was often attacked in the Brazilian press for her work, with headlines ranging from the \u201cPainter who scandalizes \u2018society\u2019\u201d to the artist who \u201cfears no \u2018sexual taboo.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cTeresinha Soares found in gesture, in the twists, deformations, and couplings of bodies a way to reorganize affections and the place of women in her time, freeing them from the condition of object to make them subjects,\u201d independent curator Fernanda Morse wrote in 2025.<\/p>\n
\n\tHer work of the era also included assemblages and installations that required audience participation, like Camas\u00a0<\/em>(Beds, 1970), for which she placed three beds on the floor of the Pal\u00e1cio das Artes in Belo Horizonte. Reflecting on that work decades later, Soares wrote on Instagram, \u201cNothing better represents the body than the bed. It is your cradle; in it you find pleasure, rest, and dreams. It is where life is born and where we face death.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAt times, Soares would recall her art with the same humor she imbued in it. Caixa de fazer amor<\/em> (Lovemaking box, 1967) is an assemblage in which two faces, seemingly on the verge of kissing, sit atop of box with a big red heart. To activate it, visitors could turn a crank to make a red heart seemingly beat. \u201cOh, my Lovemaking box\u2026 I still have fun with it. It started as a joke,\u201d she told New City Brasil<\/em> in 2017. \u201cI often say that my work is open and that it dispenses any labels.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tDespite her long life, Soares had a relatively short career as an artist, first making art in 1965 and then stopping completely in 1976. Yet, her artistic contributions, which also included prints, sculptures, installations, and performances, left their mark on the history of late 20th-century Brazilian art, which has, within the past decade, begun to be acknowledged internationally.<\/p>\n
\n\tWith Brazil\u2019s military dictatorship having begun in 1964, her 12-year career maps closely with the early years of the repressive regime. As such, she often imbued her art with a sly humor that unequivocally contronted the dictatorship\u2019s brutality and conservativeness.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cMy work,\u201d she said in the Tate interview \u201cwas profoundly related to the socio-political events of the time, and it vehemently opposed the Vietnam War, American imperialism, sexual repression, the oppression of women, the deaths and torture of political prisoners in Brazilian prisons and the lack of freedom of expression in authoritarian\u00a0regimes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThough she was active in the 1960s and \u201970s, she and her fellow Brazilian artists did not necessarily identify with Pop art. She told Tate Modern that she visited New York in 1969 where she saw the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and was \u201cwell informed\u201d about Pop, but, as an artist working in Brazil, her concerns were different from those of her American contemporaries. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI consider myself to be a Brazilian artist with a pop art influence,\u201d Soares said in the 2015 interview. \u201cYet pop art in Brazil differed greatly from pop in the United States, because of its inherent questioning of social behaviour and politics in spite of the military dictatorship that governed Brazil in the 1960s and\u00a01970s.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tTate Modern\u2019s 2015 exhibition \u201cThe World Goes Pop\u201d was important to Soares, as well as a host of other artists, being reevaluated through lens of Pop art a global movement that was interpreted differently in various countries. At Tate Modern, she showed works from her \u201cSerie Vietn\u00e3\u201d (Vietnam Series), including the 1968 work Muera usando las leg\u00edtimas alpargatas <\/em>(Die wearing the legitimate espadrilles), in which a mess of bodies piled atop each other are shown via a framing device that recalls TVs of the era, a nod to how televised the Vietnam War was. In her Tate interview, she characterized the series as \u201ca cinematic sequence that discusses my condition as a Brazilian woman subjected to the propaganda for the Vietnam War, within the framework of new\u00a0figuration.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tTate\u2019s \u201cThe World Goes Pop\u201d exhibition would be key to Soares\u2019s reevaluation, both internationally and in Brazil. In 2017, she would feature in the canon-redefining exhibition \u201cRadical Women: Latin American Art, 1960\u20131985\u201d at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, as well as have a career-survey at the Museu de Arte de S\u00e3o Paulo in Brazil, which also published her first major monograph.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThere are few postwar artists as radical, unique, and transgressive as Brazilian Teresinha Soares,\u201d Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, a cocurator of \u201cRadical Women,\u201d told ARTnews<\/em> in an email.\u00a0\u201cShe was a pioneer who starting in the 1960s created transdisciplinary art that defied social, political, gender, and artistic conventions. Soares defined her practice as \u2018an erotic art of contestation,\u2019 conceptualizing the uniqueness of her celebration of the freedom and power of female sensuality, championing femininity, pleasure and sexual emancipation as inseparable from social and political freedom, and the defense of women and human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tHer first institutional solo show in more than 40 years, the MASP exhibition gathered together more than 60 works made between 1966 and 1973, \u201cmany of them previously unseen or missing for decades,\u201d according to the museum. Part of its year-long \u201cHist\u00f3rias da sexualidade\u201d (Histories of Sexuality) programming, the exhibition was titled \u201cWho\u2019s Afraid of Teresinha Soares?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tReferencing Edward Albee\u2019s 1962 play Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf<\/em>, as well as a newspaper headline disparaging her work, the name \u201calludes to the transgressive, challenging, and anti-patriarchal nature of her work,\u201d according to MASP\u2019s exhibition description, and poses the question \u201cWho was (and still is) bothered by Teresinha Soares\u2019 art, and why?\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>Teresinha Soares, Caixa de fazer amor<\/em> (Lovemaking box), 1967. <\/span>Photo Jorge Bastos\/\u00a9Atelier Teresinha Soares\/Courtesy the artist\u2019s estate and Gomide & Co.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n\tTeresinha Soares was born in 1927 in Arax\u00e1, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and lived in Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro at different points in her childhood. She was baptized as Theresinha by her father, but changed the spelling to Teresinha when Brazilian Portuguese was modernized, she said in a 2003 lecture. During the 1940s, she was elected to the city council of Arax\u00e1, the first woman to do so.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 1956, she married Britaldo Soares and the following year they had the first of their five children, Valeska. (In a 2025 interview, Valeska said she initially resisted becoming an artist, studying architecture first, adding \u201cGrowing up, you never want to be like your mother, right?\u201d)<\/p>\n
\n\tSoares began studying art in 1965, enrolling first at the Universidade Mineira de Artes and then at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, both in Belo Horizonte. In 1966, she relocated to Rio de Janeiro, studying at the Museu de Arte Moderna, where she first met some of the era\u2019s leading artists like Ivan Serpa and Anna Maria Maiolino.<\/p>\n
\n\tDuring her active period, Soares had only three solo exhibitions, the first coming in 1967 at the Galeria Guignard in Belo Horizonte and the last at the Petite Galerie in Rio de Janeiro in 1971. She also featured in the 1967, 1971, and 1973 editions of the Bienal de S\u00e3o Paulo.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the Tate Modern interview, Soares said that she was never concerned with selling her work, especially since many of them included ephemeral materials. \u201cCreating for me was almost a physical necessity,\u201d she said. \u201cI wanted to express, scream and be heard. In my husband, Britaldo Soares, I had my patron, hence my freedom to express myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile she focused primarily on painting in the later \u201960s, the 1970s would see Soares turn more fully to performance, with pieces like Corpo a Corpo in Cor-pus Meus\u00a0<\/em>(Body to body in color-pus of mine, 1970), which paired poetry, dance, and installation into a work about sexuality, or Morte\u00a0<\/em>(Death, 1973), for which she simulated her own death. \u201cThis performance art act has a very symbolic aspect and, at the same time, it is good-humored. With this work, I wanted to desecrate death, so it is Life,\u201d she said of the latter work in 2003.<\/p>\n
\n\tThough Soares stopped making art after 1976, she said in the New City Brasil<\/em> interview that \u201cit didn\u2019t mean that I became absent from the artistic calendar.\u201d She simply wanted to spend more time with her children, who were teenagers at the time. The family also bought a farm in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais. \u201cI decided to become a farmer. It\u2019s a wonderful experience, by the way,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\n\tDuring the Q&A portion of her 2003 lecture, an audience member asked Soares, \u201cHow could it be that thirty years ago a woman was free enough to engage in an artistic manifestation of that kind?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tSeemingly summing up her career, she simply replied, \u201cAbove all courage, authenticity, and the desire to externalize my demons.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/soares-1.jpg?w=1024″] Teresinha Soares, the Brazilian artist whose paintings and installations from the 1960s and \u201970s challenged gendered-conventions of how women were both treated in Brazilian society and depicted throughout art history, died on March 31 in Belo Horizonte. She was 99 years old. She had been hospitalized after breaking her femur and never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1861038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1861038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1861038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1861038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1861038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1861038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1861038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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