Yolanda Mohalyi
1909–1978 · Hungarian-Brazilian painter and designer, a pioneer of abstraction in Latin America
Yolanda Léderer Mohalyi (Kolozsvár, 1909 – São Paulo, 23 August 1978) was a Hungarian-born painter and designer who settled in Brazil and also worked with woodcuts, mosaics, stained glass and murals. She is remembered for helping bring abstraction into Latin American art, alongside artists such as Waldemar da Costa and Cicero Dias.
She studied in Hungary and moved to Brazil in 1931 to marry Gabriel Mohalyi, a Hungarian chemist working there. In São Paulo she taught drawing and painting. Her early work included luminous watercolours and oil paintings of the human figure, strongly shaped by Lasar Segall, whose ochre palette she partly adopted. She was associated with the Grupo 7 around 1937.
After a trip to Italy in 1957, where Piero della Francesca's paintings made a deep impression on her, she gave up figurative art. Her later canvases combine large, freely overlapping areas of colour with linear elements and subtle transparencies. In 1963 she received the prize for best national woman painter at the 7th São Paulo Biennial, and in 1976 her first major retrospective was held at the MAM in São Paulo.
After her death, her friends Jürgen and Barbara Bartzsch catalogued her work and donated fifty paintings to the MAC of the University of São Paulo. Since then her work has been shown in exhibitions in 2008, 2009, 2014 and 2015, and in 2023 it was included in Action, Gesture, Paint at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.