Over five decades of her career, Maria Lídia Magliani developed a vibrant and diverse body of work, encompassing drawing, painting, illustration, and dramaturgy. The artist began her production in the 1960s, presenting a material painting in muted tones, sometimes sepia, and occasionally incorporating newspaper clippings and objects. In the early 1980s, her pictorial practice underwent an acid phase, introducing psychedelic colors that enlivened the previously somber tones. By the second half of the 1980s, Magliani merged these two early phases into a singular body of work. Through swift brushstrokes and a startling color palette, the artist created a kind of Brazilian noir, grounded in the power of expressionist figuration, where atmospheric scenes and voluptuous bodies emerge from gestures that are as lyrical as they are violent.
Magliani traversed racial and gender dimensions in an intersectional manner, decades before these debates became central in the art world. Connected to the Brazilian intellectual production of the late 20th century, she maintained close dialogue with Iberê Camargo, poet Caio Fernando Abreu, and art critic Angélica de Moraes, among other key figures in the field, relationships that were recorded in letters that kept the artist’s voice alive.
From her first solo exhibition in 1966 at the Galeria Espaço in Porto Alegre, Magliani remained in constant circulation,with expressive monographic displays: Pinacoteca de São Paulo (1981); Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul – MARGS (1986, Porto Alegre); Musée Imaginaire (2011, Brussels, Belgium). After her death in 2012, her work gained new visibility in exhibitions such as: “Magliani: a solidão do corpo” (2013, Pinacoteca Aldo Locatelli, Porto Alegre); “Magliani” (2022, Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre); “Magliani Gráfica” (2023, Museu de Arte Murilo Mendes, Juiz de Fora); and “Até de repente: Maria Lídia Magliani” (2025, Galeria Bolsa de Arte, São Paulo).
She participated in the 18th São Paulo Biennial (1985) in the “Expressionism in Brazil: Legacies and Affinities” section. She was also a recurring figure in the Panorama of Brazilian Art, appearing in the editions of 1981, 1985, 1987, and 1993. Other notable collective exhibitions in her career include: “Connections Project/Conexus” (1989, MAC USP, São Paulo); “Introspectives: Contemporary Art by Americans and Brazilians of African Descent” (1989, California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, USA); “O triunfo do contemporâneo: 20 anos do Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul” (2012, Santander Cultural, Porto Alegre); “Matéria Difusa: Um olhar sobre a coleção MACRS” (2022, Galeria de Arte Gerd Bornheim, Caxias do Sul); and “Mãos: 35 anos da Mão Afro-Brasileira” (2023, Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araújo; MAM São Paulo).
Her work is part of the collections of institutions such as the Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos (Porto Alegre), Galeria do Paço Municipal (Porto Alegre), Museu Nacional da Cultura Afro-Brasileira (Salvador), Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araújo (São Paulo), Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo – MAC USP (São Paulo), Museu de Arte do Rio – MAR (Rio de Janeiro), Museu de Arte Leopoldo Gotuzzo (Pelotas), Museu de Arte Moderna – MAM (São Paulo), Museu de Artes do Rio Grande do Sul Ado Malagoli – MARGS (Porto Alegre), Museu de Arte de Santa Catarina – MASC (Florianópolis), Pinacoteca Barão de Santo Ângelo (Porto Alegre), and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (São Paulo).
