Márcia Falcão’s solo show “Corpo de Cor” (Body of Color) at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin is unexpectedly somber. Though it often depicts scenes of leisure — yoga, dancing, capoeira — these moments of recreation are shadowed by tension and unease. She paints mostly solitary Black female figures, some in discomfortingly contorted poses or in disjunctive fragments. As a whole, the show, comprising eight large paintings and a series of twelve small portraits, all made in 2025, conveys the sense of a Black female body struggling to assert its sensuous vigor.
In the two oil paintings that open the show, Position 25 (2025) and Position 24 (2025) from the “Psychological Yoga” series (2025), the female nude gives the impression of being cramped into the frame, its curvaceous shapes filling the canvas, pushing against the edges as if to burst from it. Crouching low or leaning back, the figures strain and hunch rather than repose. Falcão’s heaped volumes and streamlined geometry faintly echo cubism. Yet her canvases also fracture and reassemble perspective in ways that feel more sensuous than analytic. As a result, compared to her lush, tensed, performatic nudes, classic cubist renderings are relatively static. Falcão infuses her nudes with warmth, pairing ochre shades of the body with vivid purple and smoky-blue. The series title also points to something deeper: yoga as a metaphor for the psychological labor of women — for how effort, endurance, and self-discipline shape their sense of embodiment.
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