Lucia Laguna Has Died

Brazilian painter Lucia Laguna, who came to art only after thirty years of teaching, has died at 85.

Brazilian painter Lucia Laguna died on September 23 at her home in Rio de Janeiro, aged 85. She came to art late: she spent thirty years teaching Portuguese and Latin before enrolling at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in the mid-1990s. Her first solo show opened in 1998, but real recognition came in 2012, with her inclusion in the São Paulo Biennial.

Laguna painted densely layered landscapes drawn from the view out of her studio window, working through an unusual process: assistants would first cover the canvas with acrylic motifs, after which she divided the surface with masking tape and reworked it in oil across multiple passes, layer by layer, a method critics called "a technique of accumulation and erasure." Her work is held in the collections of MAM São Paulo and MASP; her final U.S. solo exhibition opened at Galerie Lelong in May 2026.