Brazilian painter Lucia Laguna dies aged 85 in Rio
Brazilian painter Lucia Laguna has died in Rio de Janeiro. She was 85. She died on 21 September 2026.
G1, the Brazilian news outlet in Rio, reported the death on 21 September. It said news of her death was shared through social media posts. ARTnews, reporting two days later on 23 September, confirmed her death and gave her age as 85.
Laguna was described as a Brazilian painter working in a semi-abstract way. Semi-abstract here means her pictures stayed connected to real places while loosening them into colour, shape and brushwork. A viewer could still pick out leaves, walls or street structures inside the paint.
Her starting point was often close to home. Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, the Brazilian gallery that lists Laguna among its artists, says her paintings draw on her surroundings. Those surroundings included garden views and dense foliage. They also included fragments of city life, such as fencing and billboards.
That combination brought domestic green space together with the street outside it. Garden plants could appear near fences. Foliage could sit alongside the hard edges of billboards. The gallery's artworks page presents views, foliage and urban fragments as the repeated subjects of her pictures.
Laguna trained first in language, not art. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Language and Literature in 1971, according to an exhibition page from Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel. A separate listing from Artforum notes that she once worked as a language teacher.
The sequence is documented in stages. Degree in 1971. Work as a teacher. Later work as a painter represented by a gallery. Readers can realise the shift only from those dates and listings, because the verified reports do not fill in the years between.
No cause of death was given in the verified reports. No funeral details were published in them either. What is confirmed is the place, the date and the age: Rio de Janeiro, 21 September 2026, 85.
For anyone wanting to see the work itself, the gallery pages remain the public record. They hold the biography and the images of paintings built from gardens, leaves, fences and signs. They do not judge the pictures. They list what was made and where it was shown.
