Teresinha Soares, Brazilian Artist Who Put Desire and Power on the Canvas, Dies at 99
Teresinha Soares, a Brazilian artist whose paintings and participatory installations from the 1960s and 1970s confronted the ways women were pictured, policed, and spoken about in Brazil, died on March 31 in Belo Horizonte. She was 99.
Soares had been hospitalized after breaking her femur and did not recover, according to her daughter, the artist Valeska Soares, in comments reported by the Brazilian newspaper Estado de Minas. Her gallery, Gomide & Co. said in a statement that Soares “leaves a legacy that, in the present, keeps open investigations into desire, eroticism, and expression,” adding that her work “made a decisive contribution to discussions on the body, desire, and subjectivity in Brazilian art.”
Associated with Brazil’s New Figuration movement and, at times, the country’s New Objectivity movement, Soares developed a visual language that was both direct and sly: pared-down silhouettes, saturated color, and bodies that refuse to behave. Her women are often full-figured and unapologetically sensual, rendered with a graphic clarity that can read as playful at first glance, then quietly insistent.
“I consider the body as the axis of my poetics,” Soares said in a 2015 interview with Tate Modern. In the same conversation, she described her practice as “avant-gardist at the time,” and argued that it remained contemporary because it stayed with unresolved social realities: “the taboos of sex, male-female relationships, encounters and dis-encounters, women demanding respect within contemporary society, still fighting for rights and freedom.”
That frankness came at a cost. During her lifetime, Soares was frequently targeted in the Brazilian press for work that treated women’s sexuality as a subject rather than a spectacle. Headlines cast her as a provocateur, framing her art as a scandal and her themes as transgression.
Soares’s practice extended beyond painting into assemblage, installation, performance, and printmaking, often inviting viewers to complete the work through touch or movement. Among her best-known projects is “Camas(Beds, 1970),” an installation staged at Palácio das Artes in Belo Horizonte, where she placed three beds directly on the floor, turning a private site of intimacy into a public arena. Looking back decades later, she reflected on the bed as a condensed symbol of the body’s life cycle: “Nothing better represents the body than the bed. It is your cradle; in it you find pleasure, rest, and dreams. It is where life is born and where we face death.”
Humor, too, was part of her method. “Caixa de fazer amor (Lovemaking box, 1967)” is an assemblage in which two faces hover at the edge of a kiss above a box marked by a large red heart. Visitors can turn a crank to animate the heart’s pulse. “Oh, my Lovemaking box… I still have fun with it. It started as a joke,” she told New City Brasil in 2017, adding, “I often say that my work is open and that it dispenses any labels.”
Although she began making art in 1965 and stopped entirely in 1976, Soares’s 12-year career aligns closely with the early period of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which began in 1964. Her work’s erotic charge and its insistence on women’s agency unfolded alongside a broader critique of repression and conservatism. In the Tate interview, she linked her practice to the era’s political pressures, saying it was “profoundly related to the socio-political events of the time,” and that it opposed, among other forces, the Vietnam War, American imperialism, and sexual repression.
In recent years, Soares’s position within late 20th-century Brazilian art has been increasingly recognized beyond Brazil. Tate Modern included her in its 2015 exhibition “The World Goes Pop,” where she showed works from her “Serie Vietnã,” including “Muera usando las legítimas alpargatas(Die wearing the legitimate espadrilles).” She also spoke about traveling to New York in 1969 and encountering works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, noting the distance between U.S. Pop’s cool surfaces and the sharper political stakes that shaped pop-inflected art in Brazil.
Independent curator Fernanda Morse, writing in 2025, described Soares’s achievement in terms of form as much as subject: “Teresinha Soares found in gesture, in the twists, deformations, and couplings of bodies a way to reorganize affections and the place of women in her time, freeing them from the condition of object to make them subjects.”
Soares leaves behind a body of work that remains disarmingly legible — bright, graphic, and immediate — while continuing to press on deeper questions about desire, autonomy, and the politics that govern who gets to be seen, and on what terms.
