Márcia Falcão

Falcão’s early works place female bodies within red-tiled settings that evoke both Irajá’s architecture and Brazil’s broader built environment. Amid this interplay of the local and the general, the paintings carry an impending sense of racial and gendered violence. Gash-like passages of red impasto mark the female body and the city alike, conjuring wounded flesh and spilled blood. Yet the works resist fatalism, counterbalancing violence with sensuality, intimacy, and pleasure.

In the more recent series Ioga Psicológica [Psychological Yoga] (2022-present) and Monumentais [Monumental] (2023-present), the built environment gives way to psychological terrains. In these paintings, the body occupies the entire visual field, straining against the canvas’s confined psychic space or transforming into the landscape itself. In Falcão’s Yoga series, bodies seem to bend over backward to fit the box marked “woman.” Figures entangle and double, heads and limbs multiply; flesh dissolves into pure pigment, blurring the distinction between representation and abstraction. Contorting to fit the frame even as they resist it, Falcão’s nudes express the labor expected of women, particularly mothers.

If these earlier series depict psychological and physical confinement, Falcão’s Capoeira em Paleta Alta [Capoeira in High Palette] series (2024-present) grants its subjects a sense of jubilant empowerment and freedom. Paying homage to the titular Afro-Brazilian martial art and dance form, the series captures movement through a fanning multiplication of limbs and appendages across medium and large-scale canvases. Here, Falcão’s monumental Black women become agents of strength, agility, and finesse. This self-possession and vigor also animate the lively, gestural portraits and shapeshifting figures of the artist’s series Malandra não para [Malandra Doesn’t Stop] (2025-present).

Whether mining the physical and psychological tolls of discriminatory violence or honoring Afro-Brazilian art forms like capoeira and passinho, Falcão consistently foregrounds the expressive possibilities of paint itself. Borrowing freely from art history, her figuration enters into dialogue with the charged nudes of Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville, the weighted psychology of Francis Bacon and Francisco Goya, and the material richness of Diego Velázquez and Peter Paul Rubens. Yet these references ultimately serve as points of departure. Falcão’s layered gestural marks and hatches render paint itself as tactile and sensuous as flesh, transforming the Black female body from a site of projection into one of agency, presence, and formal invention.

Falcão’s work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions including Pai Contra Mãe, Instituto Inclusartiz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2023); and Para Além do corpo: nudez semântica, Galeria Aymoré, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2020). The artist’s work has been featured in group exhibitions including the 36th Bienal de São Paulo – Not All Travelers Walk Roads: Of Humanity as Practice, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2025), traveled to Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Goiás, Goiâna, Brazil, and Pinacoteca do Ceará, Fortaleza, Brazil (both 2026); Nossa Vida Bantu, Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2025); Baile Funk: un cri de liberté, Museu de Arte do Rio, Fiesta Lille3000, France (2025); Corpo-casa: Diálogos entre Carolee Schneeman, Diego Bianchi e Márcia Falcão, Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil (2024); Funk! Um grito de ousadia e liberdade, Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2023); A Parábola do Progresso, SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, Brazil (2022); Coleção MAR + Enciclopédia Negra, Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2022); Crônicas Cariocas, Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2021); and Ainda fazemos as coisas em grupo, Centro Municipal de Artes Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2020). Her work is included in public collections such as Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Márcia Falcão is also represented by Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin and Basel.