Lucia Laguna, Brazilian Artist Who Got Late But Fruitful Start on Painting Career, Has Died

Lucia Laguna, a Brazilian painter inspired by her lush surroundings in the hills above Rio de Janeiro, where she lived, died there at the age of 85, according to her gallery, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel. The São Paulo gallery said it was closing for the day yesterday to honor the memories of Laguna and Rodrigo Cass, another artist on the roster, who recently died in a beach accident.

“Throughout her career, Lucia developed a body of work defined by her engagement with landscape, memory, and everyday life,” said the gallery. A former language teacher, Laguna drew inspiration for her fractured and overlapping lexicon of dense, brightly colorful, semi-abstract paintings from her surroundings and experience with language. She was known to employ a collaborative creative process or pictorial dialogue with studio assistants and students, in which they were invited to paint a first layer around a theme, and then she would reply to this by accumulating and painting over or erasing under layers of pigment. “Her work, at once intimate and open to the world, occupies a fundamental place in contemporary Brazilian art,” added her gallery.

Many of her works are grouped into the well-known series “Jardim” (Garden), “Paisagem” (Landscape), “Estúdio” (Studio), and “Azulejo” (Tiles). These combine interior and exterior figurative imagery from the tropical foliage and vibrant cityscapes around her, but can appear torn and fragmented. Geometric forms almost collide and flow into organic counterparts in these abstracted compositions. “Laguna’s paintings come across sometimes as expressive and full of energy, sometimes as light and free flowing, and nearly always seem pervaded by atmospheric light,” noted one of her European galleries, Karsten Greve.

“I believe that painting can recover a time for gazing that has been lost in the chaos of images that bombard our cities,” the artist said in 2008, according to the Economia da Pintura by Paulo Herkenhoff. “The slowness, the introspection that painting entails pleases me, asking me to translate reality according to this lost perspective.”

Born in Campos dos Goytacazes, Brazil, in 1941, Laguna got a late start on her art career, having worked for years as a language and literature teacher. But all that changed when, around the age of 54, she decided to enroll in the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro in 1995. There, she studied under Charles Watson, and by 1998, had her first solo exhibit at Rio’s Cândido Mendes Cultural Centre. A major career turning point came with Laguna’s participation in the 30th São Paulo Biennale in 2012, and her artworks can now be found in the collections of major museums in Brazil. She has shown her work across the globe, from the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, and won several awards, such as Brazil’s prestigious PIPA Prize.

Laguna is survived by her daughter, Laura, and her grandchildren, João and Daniel.