{"id":780512,"date":"2026-09-24T00:46:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T00:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/780512\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T00:46:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T00:46:11","slug":"lucia-laguna-brazilian-painter-of-verdant-and-fragmented-cityscapes-has-died-aged-85-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/780512\/","title":{"rendered":"Lucia Laguna, Brazilian painter of verdant and fragmented cityscapes, has died, aged 85 – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lucia Laguna spent most of her working life teaching literature in Rio de Janeiro\u2019s public and private schools, picking up a brush only after she retired in 1994, at age 53. This late start hardly slowed her down, and she went on to become one of the most distinctive names in Brazilian contemporary painting. Born in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro state in 1941, Laguna died at her home in Rio on 21 September, she was 85. Her galleries in Rio de Janeiro and S\u00e3o Paulo (Fortes D\u2019Aloia & Gabriel<\/a>), New York and Paris (Galerie Lelong<\/a>) and London (Sadie Coles HQ<\/a>) confirmed the news of her death.<\/p>\n

Laguna had her first solo exhibition in 1998, at the Centro Cultural C\u00e2ndido Mendes in Rio, when she was 57. Her first gallery show followed in 2006, when she was 65.<\/p>\n

\u201cI chose painting as my medium because it made sense to me,\u201d Laguna said in a 2024 interview published by SP-Arte\u2019s editorial platform. \u201cI had experience with both written arts and manual crafts\u2014I even did embroidery and things like that. My husband and I owned a children\u2019s toy factory. Once you\u2019ve been in that environment and move into art, you realise that what you were doing there [at the toy factory] was essentially sculpture. Everything is connected. Making that transition was very easy, very simple.\u201d<\/p>\n

M\u00e1rcia Fortes of Fortes D\u2019Aloia & Gabriel, which started representing Laguna in 2012, says the artist developed a singular and distinctive style. \u201cYou look and you say, \u2018This is a Lucia Laguna.\u2019 It\u2019s very recognisable,\u201d Fortes tells The Art Newspaper. \u201cShe really invented a way of painting all her own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laguna\u2019s subject matter was typically whatever she saw outside her studio window in Rio’s North Zone: the tangle of cables, antennas and improvised rooftops covering Morro da Mangueira, the favela that gave the city one of its most famous samba schools. She broke these scenes into dense canvases that sat somewhere between landscape and abstraction.<\/p>\n

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Lucia Laguna, Paisagem n\u00ba 183 (Landscape n\u00ba 183), 2026 \u00a9 Lucia Laguna. Courtesy of the artist; Fortes D\u2019Aloia & Gabriel, S\u00e3o Paulo\/Rio de Janeiro; and Galerie Lelong, New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I have a style at all,\u201d Laguna said in the 2024 SP-Arte interview. \u201cStyle is something personal\u2014it comes from your own private world. In my case, I eliminate certain areas and introduce others. I layer parts of the painting. Fundamentally, that is what painting is: looking through a window at a reality outside.\u201d She added: \u201cMy intention from the start was to reproduce what I saw through the window\u2014reconstructing landscapes from my own point of view and trying to surprise the viewer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fortes emphasises Laguna\u2019s singular place in contemporary painting, adding that the complexity of her method made her work impossible to predict or replicate. \u201cShe used a lot of masking tape. She would add and remove things within those spaces,\u201d Fortes says. \u201cIt was a process of accumulation and erasure. [At times] there were as many as 16 layers. It was a very rich style of painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laguna also rotated her canvases as she worked, Fortes adds: \u201cSo, you might see a palm tree amid small houses, and suddenly it\u2019s sideways or upside down, while another house appears from a different direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Fortes, her gallery first learned about Laguna through two key figures in the Brazilian art scene: the artist Beatriz Milhazes and the curator Paulo Herkenhoff. It was Herkenhoff, she says, who was particularly persistent, arguing that Laguna needed broader international exposure. When Fortes started showing Laguna\u2019s work at international art fairs, the question of her age always came up.<\/p>\n

“When collectors asked me if she was a young artist, I usually told them, \u2018She\u2019s the oldest living emerging artist,\u2019\u201d Fortes says.<\/p>\n

Laguna had initially worked with a smaller gallery in Rio de Janeiro. When that gallery closed, Fortes D\u2019Aloia & Gabriel took her on. That was shortly before the opening of the 30th Bienal de S\u00e3o Paulo in 2012, and Fortes recalls discovering how strong-willed Laguna could be during the installation process.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were paintings resting on the floor, paintings high up on the wall, paintings at various heights clustered together\u2014in short, it was like an open-studio presentation,\u201d Fortes says. She tried to persuade Laguna that a more \u201cconventional, cleaner look\u201d would suit a newcomer to the art world, but the artist would not hear of it. \u201cShe was very sure about it, and it worked.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lucia Laguna, Paisagem n\u00ba 177 (Landscape n\u00ba 177), 2026 \u00a9 Lucia Laguna. Courtesy of the artist; Fortes D\u2019Aloia & Gabriel, S\u00e3o Paulo\/Rio de Janeiro; and Galerie Lelong, New York<\/p>\n

Throughout the 2010s, Laguna became well-known in Brazil but did not receive much international exposure. That changed in 2021, the year she turned 80. Fortes recounts a serendipitous encounter at that year\u2019s Art Basel fair in Switzerland, which was held in September and that some dealers skipped because of the pandemic. Fortes D\u2019Aloia & Gabriel took part, occupying a stand usually held by 303 Gallery, directly across from Sadie Coles HQ.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy outer wall had a beautiful diptych by Laguna, and Sadie worked looking at that painting all day, every day,\u201d Fortes says. \u201cOne day, I saw her admiring the work, and I jumped at the chance to show her Laguna\u2019s portfolio.\u201d<\/p>\n

A week later, according to Fortes, Coles called to offer Laguna a solo exhibition. The artist opened her first London solo show, Life Is Only Possible Reinvented<\/a>, in November 2022 at Sadie Coles HQ.<\/p>\n

\u201cThroughout her career, Lucia developed a body of work defined by her engagement with landscape, memory and everyday life,\u201d a spokesperson for Sadie Coles HQ said in a statement. \u201cHer paintings incorporate fragments of the city, houses, gardens and her surroundings, which are transformed into complex compositions through processes of accumulation and erasure, in successive layers of paint. Her work, at once intimate and open to the world, occupies a fundamental place in contemporary Brazilian art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laguna\u2019s first solo exhibition in the US and debut with Galerie Lelong, Apenas Meus Cabelos S\u00e3o Brancos<\/a> (Only My Hair Is White), opened in New York in May. The bright, colour-filled canvases, some enormous in scale, once again reflected her distinctive view of her surroundings.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the geographer Milton Santos put it: \u2018The world is what one sees from where one stands.\u2019 That was my starting point. I was there\u2014on Rua Naz\u00e1rio [in Rio de Janeiro]\u2014surrounded by a landscape: a garden, my own home. So, that was what I would paint,\u201d she said in the 2024 interview. \u201cAll that vast expanse of buildings, the urban sprawl and the city\u2019s suffocating density\u2014it was all right there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lucia Laguna spent most of her working life teaching literature in Rio de Janeiro\u2019s public and private schools,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":780513,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,257198,1120,96,3879,25051,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-780512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-brazilian-art","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-obituaries","tag-rio-de-janeiro","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/780513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}