After years of institutional exhibitions of Brazilian painting often limited to early-modernist figuration and mid-century abstraction — and the work of Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfatti, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Mira Schendel being feted internationally — a new wave of Brazilian artists is injecting the medium with a sense of urgency and vigor.
Brazil previously saw a “return to painting” with the Geração 80 (’80s Generation) and abandonment of strict geometric abstraction; though, as evidenced by some of that era’s artists, including Luiz Zerbini, Beatriz Milhazes, Leda Catunda, and José Leonilson, abstraction never fully went away. Instead, it fused with the materiality of the medium, resulting in a hybrid approach still present in contemporary painting.
While Brazilian women artists have certainly challenged stereotypes of beauty and womanhood before — Anna Bella Geiger and Lenora de Barros immediately come to mind — the frankness with which Brazilian women painters depict eroticism today, be it through their dogged, unvarnished portrayals of the female body and desire, or their bracing examinations of violence against women, seems uniquely of the moment.
Here are five artists to know.
Márcia Falcão
Kineticism underpins Falcão’s monumental, mostly female nudes, exhibited at the 36th São Paulo Biennial in 2025 and in her 2025 solo show, Corpo de Cor (Body of Color), at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. If the female body is a landscape, as Diana Ruzova wrote about Falcão’s work for Hyperallergic, it is often a somber one.
