Yolanda Mohalyi

Yolanda Léderer Mohalyi (1909 – August 23, 1978) was a painter and designer who worked with woodcuts, mosaics, stained glass and murals as well as more usual materials.

Her work appeared in group shows during the 1930s, In 1963, she was awarded the prize for best painter from Brazil at the 7th São Paulo Art Biennial. In 1965, her work was featured in a solo show at the 8th São Paulo Art Biennial. (formerly the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America ), the Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo (MAC), the Casa Roberto Marinho in Rio de Janeiro, and the Cleusa Garfinkel collection in Brazil.

Career Early life Yolanda Léderer was born in 1909 in what was then Kolozsvár, Kingdom of Hungary (later Cluj-Napoca, Romania.) She studied at the Free School of Nagybánya and then attended the Royal Academy of Budapest from 1927 to 1929. Her parents were musicians. She learned bel canto singing and was a life-long lover of classical music, describing her later abstract work as musical. , Eleonore Koch, and Alice Brill. Her earliest works were often vivid watercolors, with a sense of light and transparency, (1895-1967),

World War II brought changes: in 1939 Gabriel Mohalyi lost his job, and the couple moved to Rio Grande do Sul for a time. and some of her works from the 1940s, such as "Memórias" (Memories) reflect the situation of World War II refugees. Later, she designed stained glass for the Capela de São Francisco in Itatiaia.

Abstraction In 1957, Mohalyi returned to Europe for the first time since she had left in 1931. In Arezzo, Italy, she was deeply struck by the paintings of Piero della Francesca, a fifteenth-century Renaissance master. By her own account, his work determined her to abandon figurative painting. In 1959, she participated in the Primeira Exposição Coletiva de Artistas Brasileiros na Europa.

Between 1960 and 1962, Mohalyi taught in the FAAP design and plastic arts course.

Mohalyi participated in multiple national and international exhibitions and almost all the international São Paulo Art Biennials between 1951 and 1967. In 1963, she was awarded the prize for best national painter in Brazil at the 7th São Paulo Art Biennial. Throughout her life, Mohalyi exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions in Europe, Japan and the United States as well as Latin America.

In 1979, a memorial exhibition of her work was shown at the 15th São Paulo Biennale. Her work was also shown in posthumous solo exhibitions in 1982 and 1984 at the DAN Galeria in São Paulo.

Mohalyi's work continues to be of interest in the 21st century. Art historian and curator Maria Alice Milliet has studied her work, curating exhibitions in 2008, 2009, and 2015. In 2008, an exhibit at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba focused on Mohalyi's lyrical abstraction. In 2009, a retrospective exhibition at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo covered Mohalyi's work from the 1930s to the 1970s.

In 2014, a retrospective of Mohalyi's work at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM) included more than 400 works. Wolfgang Pfeiffer presented a talk about her work.

In 2015, the retrospective exhibition Yolanda Mohalyi: A Grande Viagem at Dan Galeria, focused on around 50 of her works. The exhibition coincided with the publication of Yolanda Mohalyi : a grande viagem (Yolanda Mohalyi : a great journey) by Milliet and Margarida Sant'Anna, the most extensive biography to date about Mohalyi's work.

In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

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