It is with great sadness that we share the passing of Katie van Scherpenberg, who died on Friday 20 June, age 84 in Rio de Janeiro.
Van Scherpenberg profoundly pushed the boundaries of painting, extending her use of colour beyond the canvas to intervene in physical spaces and highlight the role of the body. Her painting and performance practice - inextricably bound to the Amazon - was driven by a fascination with impermanence.
Across a fifty year career, van Scherpenberg mined the relationship between nature and humans, using pigments that she made from the soil to create landscape painting that faded back into nature, letting the earth become both medium and message.
Van Scherpenberg’s formative years were spent between Brazil and England. After studying painting in Europe with Oskar Kokoschka, she returned to Brazil, moving to the remote Amazonian island of Santana, where she stayed for two decades.
Returning to Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s, van Scherpenberg taught at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage and collaborated with the National Foundation for the Arts to develop quality artist materials in Brazil, pioneering the production of paints derived from the mineral pigments of Brazilian soil.
This endeavour deepened her longstanding explorations of materiality and cerebral examinations into the medium of painting. At Parque Lage she performed Jardim Vermelho, a landmark event in the history of Brazilian painting, exploring the porous boundaries between nature, femininity and artistic gesture.
She exhibited extensively in Brazil throughout her lifetime, including at the São Paulo Biennial 1981 and 1989, leaving an indelible mark on the artistic landscape.
Van Scherpenberg joined Cecilia Brunson Projects in 2019, presenting solo exhibitions at the gallery in 2021 and 2023 as well as standout solo booths at The Armory Show (2021) and Frieze Masters (2022). In March 2025, Galatea presented van Scherpenberg's last solo exhibition in São Paulo and began representing the artist in collaboration with Cecilia Brunson Projects.
Her ephemeral paintings are only beginning to be fully recognised as trailblazing and profound articulations of ecofeminist thought, and a point of reference for one of the most pressing subjects challenging artists today.
“Katie’s expansive practice was nomadic, raw and fearless. Her approach to materials as bearers of temporality, combined with a singular vision, made her work potent with psychological depth.
Her life was defined by upheavals: at age three she settled in the UK during the tumultuous World War II years; in her twenties she returned to Brazil just one week after the coup, which marked the start of the military dictatorship - a subject she boldly confronted in her work with dark wit. In a characteristic gesture of autonomy, she later moved with her daughter to the remote Ilha de Santana, producing work that was a testament to this Amazonian landscape, the source which fed and sustained her practice.
I’ll never forget meeting Katie in 2006, crouched over her landscape installation on the lawns of the Blanton Museum in Texas where her signature blood-red pigment met the bright green grass only to dissolve over time and be consumed back into the earth.
We are so grateful for Katie’s immense contribution to Brazilian art and to the art world at large.”
- Cecilia Brunson
