Lives in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Teresinha Soares is a visual artist, poet and chronicler born in Araxá in 1927 and based in Belo Horizonte since the 1950s. With a brief and forceful career, her artistic production was concentrated between 1966 and 1976, a period in which she took part in salons, exhibitions and three editions of the Bienal de São Paulo (1967, 1971 and 1973). Her work stands out for its affirmation of a free and politically engaged female subjectivity, combining eroticism, social criticism and visual experimentation. Through collages, installations, objects and drawings, Teresinha built her own vocabulary, which challenged the normative standards of art and society in the 1960s and 1970s.
Before starting her career in the visual arts, she was a pioneer in politics: she was the first woman elected as a councillor in her hometown. At the end of the 1950s, she moved to Belo Horizonte with her husband, Britaldo Soares, then director of Diários Associados in Minas Gerais. In the capital of Minas Gerais, she began her artistic training through free courses and workshops aimed at the study and practice of the arts, with the desire to become a professional in the field. In parallel to her work in the visual arts, she developed a solid career as a columnist, with texts published regularly until the end of the 1980s in three of the city's newspapers. Some of this material was collected and published in the book Acontecências: crônicas dos anos 60, 70 e 80 (Cobogó, 2018).
Her solo exhibitions include Caixas e Óleos, at Galeria Guignard (Belo Horizonte, 1967); Amo São Paulo, at Galeria Art-Art (São Paulo, 1968); and Corpo a Corpo in Cor-pus meus, at Petite Galerie (Rio de Janeiro, 1971), then run by Franco Terranova (1923-2013), a key gallerist for the Brazilian avant-garde. Decades later, her work was revisited in the exhibitions Quem tem medo de Teresinha Soares? at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand - MASP (São Paulo, 2017); in Teresinha Soares, at the Palácio das Artes (Belo Horizonte, 2018) and finally in Um alegre teatro sério, at Gomide&Co (São Paulo, 2023). These exhibitions contributed to her critical and historical revaluation on the contemporary art circuit.
Among the group exhibitions, she participated in The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop at the Tate Modern (London, 2015), which highlighted pop art experiences outside the hegemonic centers; Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2017; Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2018 and Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2018), a landmark exhibition reviewing women's contributions in the period; and Pop Brasi: vanguarda e nova figuração, 1960-70 (Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2022), dedicated to the country's experimental production at that historical moment.
Her works are in the collections of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand – MASP, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro – MAM Rio, the Museu de Arte da Pampulha – MAP and the Palácio das Artes, both in Belo Horizonte. In 2023, she was one of the artists featured in the documentary Radical Women, directed by Isabel De Luca, alongside names such as Cecilia Vicuña, Liliana Porter and Lenora de Barros.