Since the late 20th century, we’ve witnessed a growing movement to rediscover and reclaim the work of women artists who were either overlooked in their time or barely acknowledged by their peers. This has meant revisiting the history of art and its canon—a canon that long excluded women from its grand narrative, often casting them in subordinate roles within a tradition steeped in misogyny. A striking example of this bias—among other forms of prejudice and discrimination—was a 1947 exhibition at the historic Domus Gallery, São Paulo’s first modern art space. Its title was tellingly outdated: Wives of Well-Known Painters. Such a name would be unthinkable today. The show featured artists like Lucia Suanê—then married to Nelson Nóbrega and notably the only one who didn’t adopt her husband’s last name—alongside Judith Volpi, Lisbeth Rebolo, and Gertrudes Levy. Only Noêmia Mourão, married at the time to Di Cavalcanti, was missing (GH). According to the show’s organizer, none other than Concrete art pioneer Waldemar Cordeiro, these women worked in the shared studio spaces of their husbands, learning and creating under their stylistic influence. Even so, Cordeiro singled out Suanê as a more complete artist, less of a dilettante, and someone already producing authentic, original work. (1) Indeed, she appears to have been the only one to develop a sustained, if quiet, career—long and intense—with a consistent body of work very much in tune with her time. Her paintings are held in major museum collections, and she earned recognition through exhibitions and awards both in Brazil and abroad, despite remaining relatively unknown in her local art scene. She left behind a unique body of work, marked by intellect, feminine sensitivity, and a vivid connection to folk imagination. Born in Pernambuco but based in São Paulo since the 1940s, Suanê held her first solo exhibition in 1946 at the Itá Gallery, where she was well received by critics as an original and promising talent. Her early works portrayed landscapes, city scenes, street markets, popular festivities, and religious themes—all drawn from a personal imagination shaped by her childhood in Brazil’s northeastern countryside. Her painting style at the time was flat and naïve, with scattered figures arranged over backgrounds in dynamic compositions, rendered in vibrant colors with precise incisions (Trecho de feira I and II, Macaco de cheiro, all from 1946). Yet what stands out in this first period—lasting until the early 1970s—is her gradual move away from narrative spontaneity toward more structured compositions. Her work became characterized by dense color zones, simplified forms, and a more abstract reasoning (Imbus, 1958; Barraca de romãs, 1963; Catavento, 1973). From there, it felt natural that her work would evolve into the Cosmic series (1988)—abstract paintings that evoke dreamlike spaces with floating shapes suggesting music and movement—presented in a solo exhibition at Paulo Vasconcelos Gallery (2). Still, despite the growing success and exhibition invitations during the 1950s, Suanê—without ever publicly explaining why—chose to withdraw from the public art scene. She continued to paint in her home studio, though she often went through long periods with no professional activity at all. This exhibition brings together a representative selection from the final stage of Suanê’s career, which began after the death and mourning of her partner in 1998. It spans approximately twenty years of work. The emergence of this surprising body of work—by an artist long known for her tempera paintings—reveals her remarkable ability to transform. She abandoned the traditional frameworks of her earlier practice and launched herself into an open field of formal experimentation, where her works emerged from an abstract mode of thinking—a desire for form built from materials, lines, and colors. She embraced processes of appropriation, assemblage, collage, sewing, embroidery, construction, binding, and makeshift improvisations. Suanê began to create paintings as handcrafted objects—fresh and vigorous works involving the manipulation of canvases, wood, fabric, rope, string, beads, metal, wire, cardboard, even strands of hair, among other materials—in a process that felt boldly liberating. For her, this was a vital experience after nearly a decade without producing art. (3) Naturally, the popular imagery of Pernambuco—the culture of her origins—continued to inhabit her memory and construction processes. But it’s also fascinating to see how this body of work reflects a perceptive engagement with the movements, styles, and practices that shaped modern and contemporary visual culture: Cícero Dias, Volpi, the Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Fontana, Nelson Leirner, the influence of abstraction, Arte Povera, the dematerialization of artistic processes, Minimalism (Sertão Jatobá, n.d.), and Louise Bourgeois (Aranha, n.d.). These are not direct influences on her work but form part of the rich visual repertoire that shaped her cosmopolitan perspective. This collection of works suggests a kind of visual testament—a plastic narrative of Suanê’s aesthetic vision—an account of how she responded to her time, in the language of her time, fully conscious of her artistic autonomy (4). The body of work is crafted from a patchwork pictorial poetics: woods and canvases bound, nailed, screwed together in compositions guided by intuitive, hands-on geometry. Still, the parts move together in a synchronized rhythm—sometimes musical, sometimes sharp and percussive (Aconteceu ontem, s.d.; Tijipió, 2018; Pastoril de Olinda, s.d.). Her constructive thinking uses collage and assemblage as core strategies; the pictorial plane becomes a communicative structure of colors, shapes, spaces, and gestures. Within medium-sized, consistently formatted works—featuring stained, often monochromatic backgrounds—these paintings turn into spaces for staging the act of painting itself: threads and wires form lines; cut-out, colored shapes of aluminum and wood are applied; strips of fabric, concrete brushstrokes, and clipped forms come together (Manaré, Mamulengo series, 2015; Catuama, n.d.; Untitled, 2019). These are paintings without tension. They appear playful—forms, memories—and offer themselves to the viewer with a beauty that is frank, direct, and resonant (5). The Bolsas (Purses) series—those quintessentially feminine accessories (there are more than twenty!)—reveals a playful irreverence toward geometric forms and showcases Suanê’s pop spirit. According to her, they evoke memories of her mother’s handbags, her grandmother’s, and likely her own and those of her friends. But beyond nostalgia, the series carries a symbolic charge—about what handbags contain, and what they represent. Intimacy. Womanhood. These works are relatively large, especially when compared to the portable objects they reference. Suanê appropriates only the shape—the design—stripping it of its function and converting it into a pictorial plane composed of lines, color zones, and luminous, precisely placed details. The result of this simple, economical construction is a group of pieces that are elegant, humorous, and quietly sentimental. In a more daring constructive gesture, Suanê begins cutting the edges of her canvases, inserting wedges of color, carving holes or slits into the pictorial plane, and extending the work onto the wall itself. In other words, she lets the painting spill beyond the frame—breaking its boundaries and occupying the wall space with a kind of visual tension (Barra de Guabiraba, 2017; Lua cheia, n.d.; Untitled, n.d.). Through all of this work, she demonstrates a thoroughly contemporary intelligence. To conclude, one frequently cited fact in Suanê’s biography is that she was the great-aunt of the celebrated contemporary artist Antônio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão—better known as Tunga. And yes, according to family accounts, the two were close, sharing an affectionate and intellectual bond marked by mutual professional respect, preserved in letters. Yet there is little in their visual languages that directly connects them. What they seem to share, despite the thirty years between them, is a bold, ambitious, and provocative spirit. DNA. Both made their artistic practice an exercise in freedom. — Ivo Mesquita
April 2025 NOTES "Uma exposição diferente e original". ("An unusual and original exhibition.") Folha da Noite, São Paulo, April 2, 1947, p. 6. (Lucia Suanê Archive / Enciclopédia Itaú Cultural Eletrônica). Much like the title of the exhibition itself, the newspaper headline echoed a kind of paternalistic framing. It was during this exhibition that Vilma Eid, co-owner of the gallery alongside Torquato Saboya, first encountered Lucia Suanê and her work—whom she now represents. Though she had withdrawn from exhibiting, Suanê continued to frequent artists and attend exhibitions and very likely never missed an edition of the São Paulo Biennial, in which she had participated in its inaugural year, 1951. It is worth noting that what once appeared as landscapes or subjects in the early phase of Suanê’s career, by the end reemerges in the titles of her works—showing the literary side of her practice. These titles evoke images, places, or memories: Os homens de Catimbau, n.d.; Tejucopapo, n.d.; Pastoril do Cordão Encarnado or Quixabá II, n.d., among others. They are no longer direct representations, but interpretations of lived experience. Suanê’s treatment of painting as object—her drive to push it outward into space—makes certain works strikingly resemble flat sculptures pressed against the wall: Trecho de festa, 2010; Luar de Orocó II, 2017; Anoitecimento 2, 2017. They’re full of humor.