Jandyra Waters: A Life in Painting

Cecilia Brunson Projects is pleased to present A Life in Painting, the first solo exhibition in London dedicated to the work of Jandyra Waters (1921–2025), a singular figure in Brazilian post-war abstraction. Featuring paintings from the 1960s to the early 2000s, the exhibition traces the evolution of Waters’ approach to colour, form and space over the course of her career.

Waters came to abstraction at a moment of extraordinary artistic experimentation in Brazil. Concrete and Neo-Concrete art were transforming the possibilities of geometric abstraction, but she remained independent of both movements. In her paintings, structure is never static. Planes overlap, lines slice across the surface and shapes seem to tilt, float or press against one another. Acidic reds and blues meet ochres, browns and muted greens. Hard edges are offset by curves and irregular forms. Geometry holds the composition in place as colour sets it in motion.

The works in A Life in Painting reveal how that language changed over time. In the early 1960s, influenced in part by European Tachisme, Waters worked with fluid, organic forms that hover between abstraction and figuration. By the end of the decade, these shapes became bolder and more rhythmic, sweeping across the canvas in increasingly saturated fields of colour. During the 1980s, her forms became more architectural and space was constructed through sharply delineated planes. Across these shifts, colour remained fundamental, bringing vitality and an unexpected lyricism to even her most geometric paintings.

Waters also explored rhythm and balance through poetry, publishing three volumes of haiku during her lifetime. The discipline of haiku offers a parallel to her paintings, in which a small number of carefully placed elements carry considerable visual weight.

Waters exhibited regularly in Brazil from the late 1950s and was championed by critics including Theon Spanudis, Mário Schenberg and José Geraldo Vieira, yet her work remained comparatively overlooked within histories of post-war Brazilian abstraction. Following her passing last year at the age of 103, A Life in Painting pays tribute to Waters and her lifelong devotion to the possibilities of painting.

Jandyra Waters (1921–2025) was born in Sertãozinho, São Paulo, Brazil. In 1945, she volunteered with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), working in post-war Europe. She later settled in Lewes, East Sussex, where she attended a local branch of the County Council Art School in 1948. Returning to São Paulo in 1950, Waters continued her artistic education in the studios of Yoshiya Takaoka and Clóvis Graciano and took courses at Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), before briefly studying Art History at the University of São Paulo in 1952. Waters first exhibited at the Salão Paulista de Arte Moderna in 1957 and held her first solo exhibition at Galeria Aremar, Campinas, in 1963. In 1967, she participated in the 9th São Paulo Biennial, an edition notable for the prominence of Pop Art and the inclusion of Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns in the US delegation.

Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Waters exhibited extensively in Brazil and internationally. Recent institutional exhibitions include Five Essays on MASP – Geometries, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paulo (2025), and Continuities: 2000 Years of Female Art in South America, Embassy of Brazil, London (2023). Her work is held in the collections of MASP; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP); Pinacoteca de São Paulo; and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP).

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Download essay by Adrian Locke, Jandyra Waters: The Perfect Heretic (July 2026)

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