Women Painters Lead Brazil’s New Wave of Figuration
Panmela Castro, Agrade Camíz, Márcia Falcão, Maya Weishof, and Gokula Stoffel are five artists at the helm of the revival.
Brazil’s contemporary art scene is witnessing a resurgence of figurative painting, with women artists leading the charge. For years, Brazilian exhibitions largely focused on early modernist figuration, mid-century abstraction, and the work of icons like Tarsila do Amaral and Lygia Clark. However, a new generation of painters is injecting the medium with urgency and vigor.
The “return to painting” movement of the 1980s generation had abandoned strict geometric abstraction, but it never fully disappeared. Instead, it merged with the materiality of the medium, creating a hybrid approach that continues in today’s painting. While Brazilian women artists have always challenged beauty and womanhood stereotypes, the frankness with which contemporary female painters depict eroticism, violence against women, and the female body seems particularly poignant. Here are five artists to know:
Panmela Castro stands out with her 2021–22 solo exhibition at Galeria Luisa Strina in São Paulo, titled "To Flaunt is to be alive." Castro’s series of nudes presents a candid and intimate portrayal of the body, affirming its resilience. She often depicts her subjects twice, imagining their paintings hanging on their walls, a concept that resonates with the lack of institutional archive imagery that often preserves the memories of Black-Brazilian communities.
Castro’s works convey psychological and physical pain, using portraiture and self-reflexive gestures as a means of symbolic recovery.
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