Teresinha Soares, the Brazilian artist whose paintings and installations from the 1960s and ’70s challenged gendered-conventions of how women were both treated in Brazilian society and depicted throughout art history, died on March 31 in Belo Horizonte. She was 99 years old.She had been hospitalized after breaking her femur and never recovered, according to her daughter, artist Valeska Soares, as reported by Brazilian newspaper Estado de Minas. “Teresinha Soares leaves a legacy that, in the present, keeps open investigations into desire, eroticism, and expression,” the artist’s gallery, Gomide & Co., wrote on Instagram, adding that her body of work “made a decisive contribution to discussions on the body, desire, and subjectivity in Brazilian art.”A key figure of Brazil’s New Figuration movement and at times associated with the country’s New Objectivity movement, Teresinha Soares is best-known for her pared-down silhouettes of figures in eye-popping color. Soares’s art has a certain eroticism to them, her women full-figured and sumptuous.“I consider the body as the axis of my poetics,” she told Tate Modern in a 2015 interview. “My practice, considered avant-gardist at the time, continues to be contemporary because it focuses on all the issues that are still of concern today: the taboos of sex, male-female relationships, encounters and dis-encounters, women demanding respect within contemporary society, still fighting for rights and freedom.”For the era, her work was provocative for how it showed a woman unafraid to tackle women’s sexuality and their oppression in a male-dominate society head-on. She was often attacked in the Brazilian press for her work, with headlines ranging from the “Painter who scandalizes ‘society’” to the artist who “fears no ‘sexual taboo.’”“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,” independent curator Fernanda Morse wrote in 2025.Her work of the era also included assemblages and installations that required audience participation, like Camas (Beds, 1970), for which she placed three beds on the floor of the Palácio das Artes in Belo Horizonte. Reflecting on that work decades later, Soares wrote on Instagram, “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.”At times, Soares would recall her art with the same humor she imbued in it. Caixa de fazer amor (Lovemaking box, 1967) is an assemblage in which two faces, seemingly on the verge of kissing, sit atop of box with a big red heart. To activate it, visitors could turn a crank to make a red heart seemingly beat. “Oh, my Lovemaking box… I still have fun with it. It started as a joke,” she told New City Brasil in 2017. “I often say that my work is open and that it dispenses any labels.”Despite her long life, Soares had a relatively short career as an artist, first making art in 1965 and then stopping completely in 1976. Yet, her artistic contributions, which also included prints, sculptures, installations, and performances, left their mark on the history of late 20th-century Brazilian art, which has, within the past decade, begun to be acknowledged internationally.With Brazil’s military dictatorship having begun in 1964, her 12-year career maps closely with the early years of the repressive regime. As such, she often imbued her art with a sly humor that unequivocally contronted the dictatorship’s brutality and conservativeness.“My work,” she said in the Tate interview “was profoundly related to the socio-political events of the time, and it vehemently opposed the Vietnam War, American imperialism, sexual repression, the oppression of women, the deaths and torture of political prisoners in Brazilian prisons and the lack of freedom of expression in authoritarian regimes.”Though she was active in the 1960s and ’70s, she and her fellow Brazilian artists did not necessarily identify with Pop art. She told Tate Modern that she visited New York in 1969 where she saw the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and was “well informed” about Pop, but, as an artist working in Brazil, her concerns were different from those of her American contemporaries. “I consider myself to be a Brazilian artist with a pop art influence,” Soares said in the 2015 interview. “Yet pop art in Brazil differed greatly from pop in the United States, because of its inherent questioning of social behaviour and politics in spite of the military dictatorship that governed Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s.”Tate Modern’s 2015 exhibition “The World Goes Pop” was important to Soares, as well as a host of other artists, being reevaluated through lens of Pop art a global movement that was interpreted differently in various countries. At Tate Modern, she showed works from her “Serie Vietnã” (Vietnam Series), including the 1968 work Muera usando las legítimas alpargatas (Die wearing the legitimate espadrilles), in which a mess of bodies piled atop each other are shown via a framing device that recalls TVs of the era, a nod to how televised the Vietnam War was. In her Tate interview, she characterized the series as “a cinematic sequence that discusses my condition as a Brazilian woman subjected to the propaganda for the Vietnam War, within the framework of new figuration.” Tate’s “The World Goes Pop” exhibition would be key to Soares’s reevaluation, both internationally and in Brazil. In 2017, she would feature in the canon-redefining exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, as well as have a career-survey at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in Brazil, which also published her first major monograph.“There are few postwar artists as radical, unique, and transgressive as Brazilian Teresinha Soares,” Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, a cocurator of “Radical Women,” told ARTnews in an email. “She was a pioneer who starting in the 1960s created transdisciplinary art that defied social, political, gender, and artistic conventions. Soares defined her practice as ‘an erotic art of contestation,’ conceptualizing the uniqueness of her celebration of the freedom and power of female sensuality, championing femininity, pleasure and sexual emancipation as inseparable from social and political freedom, and the defense of women and human rights.”Her first institutional solo show in more than 40 years, the MASP exhibition gathered together more than 60 works made between 1966 and 1973, “many of them previously unseen or missing for decades,” according to the museum. Part of its year-long “Histórias da sexualidade” (Histories of Sexuality) programming, the exhibition was titled “Who’s Afraid of Teresinha Soares?”Referencing Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, as well as a newspaper headline disparaging her work, the name “alludes to the transgressive, challenging, and anti-patriarchal nature of her work,” according to MASP’s exhibition description, and poses the question “Who was (and still is) bothered by Teresinha Soares’ art, and why?”Teresinha Soares, Caixa de fazer amor (Lovemaking box), 1967. Photo Jorge Bastos/©Atelier Teresinha Soares/Courtesy the artist's estate and Gomide & Co.Teresinha Soares was born in 1927 in Araxá, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and lived in Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro at different points in her childhood. She was baptized as Theresinha by her father, but changed the spelling to Teresinha when Brazilian Portuguese was modernized, she said in a 2003 lecture. During the 1940s, she was elected to the city council of Araxá, the first woman to do so.In 1956, she married Britaldo Soares and the following year they had the first of their five children, Valeska. (In a 2025 interview, Valeska said she initially resisted becoming an artist, studying architecture first, adding “Growing up, you never want to be like your mother, right?”)Soares began studying art in 1965, enrolling first at the Universidade Mineira de Artes and then at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, both in Belo Horizonte. In 1966, she relocated to Rio de Janeiro, studying at the Museu de Arte Moderna, where she first met some of the era’s leading artists like Ivan Serpa and Anna Maria Maiolino.During her active period, Soares had only three solo exhibitions, the first coming in 1967 at the Galeria Guignard in Belo Horizonte and the last at the Petite Galerie in Rio de Janeiro in 1971. She also featured in the 1967, 1971, and 1973 editions of the Bienal de São Paulo.In the Tate Modern interview, Soares said that she was never concerned with selling her work, especially since many of them included ephemeral materials. “Creating for me was almost a physical necessity,” she said. “I wanted to express, scream and be heard. In my husband, Britaldo Soares, I had my patron, hence my freedom to express myself.”While she focused primarily on painting in the later ’60s, the 1970s would see Soares turn more fully to performance, with pieces like Corpo a Corpo in Cor-pus Meus (Body to body in color-pus of mine, 1970), which paired poetry, dance, and installation into a work about sexuality, or Morte (Death, 1973), for which she simulated her own death. “This performance art act has a very symbolic aspect and, at the same time, it is good-humored. With this work, I wanted to desecrate death, so it is Life,” she said of the latter work in 2003.Though Soares stopped making art after 1976, she said in the New City Brasil interview that “it didn’t mean that I became absent from the artistic calendar.” She simply wanted to spend more time with her children, who were teenagers at the time. The family also bought a farm in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais. “I decided to become a farmer. It’s a wonderful experience, by the way,” she said.During the Q&A portion of her 2003 lecture, an audience member asked Soares, “How could it be that thirty years ago a woman was free enough to engage in an artistic manifestation of that kind?”Seemingly summing up her career, she simply replied, “Above all courage, authenticity, and the desire to externalize my demons.”