Brazilian painter Lucia Laguna, Venezuelan photographer Nelson Garrido, and Argentine painter, draftsman, and printmaker Carlos Alonso have died, leaving behind bodies of work that spanned continents and, in two cases, directly confronted state and religious power.

Lucia Laguna (1941–2026), Brazilian painter and collage artist

Laguna drew from her immediate surroundings in Rio de Janeiro's lush North Zone in her paintings and collages. She exhibited at the 2012 São Paulo Biennial and received numerous solo shows across the United States, South America, and Europe.

Her gallerist Sadie Coles described the engine of the work in a statement to Hyperallergic. "Lucia had an urgent curiosity about the art that informed the development of her own practice, but was undeniably inspired by her immediate surroundings in Brazil," Coles said. "The construction of her compositions, depicting the flora and fauna surrounding her studio, often connected verdant portals of different viewpoints or arrangements that were suggestive of the view of Rio from her window."

That account places Laguna firmly within a lineage of painters who treated the garden and the window as compositional problems — and who solved them through collage, layered viewpoints, and a palette drawn directly from tropical vegetation.

Nelson Garrido (1952–2026), Venezuelan photographer who challenged power

Garrido's radically raw photographs interrogated power, religion, violence, and eroticism across a practice of more than half a century, despite facing relentless censorship from church and state alike.

Institutional recognition came anyway. He became the first photographer to win Venezuela's National Prize for Visual Art in 1991, and in 2021 he received the International Association of Art Critics Venezuelan Chapter Master of Arts Award. He also won a number of other prizes he rejected — a detail that says as much about his posture toward officialdom as the photographs themselves.

Garrido was photographed in Caracas in 2019 by Vladimir Marcano in one of the last widely circulated portraits of the artist.

Carlos Alonso (1929–2026), Argentine painter, draftsman, and printmaker

Alonso's socialist realist and new realist works gave visual form to Argentina's cultural heritage and its dark political history. Over a long career he became one of the country's defining artistic witnesses, working across painting, drawing, and printmaking.

He won Argentina's prestigious Platinum Konex Award twice. His exhibition record ran wide across Latin America and Europe, including the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana in Cuba, and galleries across the United Kingdom and Italy.

A photograph from around 1960 by Anatole Saderman shows Alonso with his daughter Paloma — a document of the artist at the outset of a career that would stretch into his tenth decade.

Taken together, the three deaths mark the loss of artists who worked in distinct media and countries but shared a grounding in place: Rio's North Zone gardens, Caracas under censorship, Argentina's political memory. Their galleries, biographies, and prize records — from the São Paulo Biennial to Venezuela's National Prize to the double Platinum Konex — now stand as the framework through which the next generation of curators will reassess their legacies.