Carmen Aldunate

Carmen Zita Aldunate Salas was born in Viña del Mar, Chile, on 10 February 1940. She entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile at seventeen and continued her studies at the Facultad de Bellas Artes of the Universidad de Chile. Among her professors were Mario Carreño, Roser Bru, Nemesio Antúnez, Delia del Carril, Mario Toral and José Balmes. She later took postgraduate work in the Department of Art at the University of California, Davis, and lived in the United States for about seven years before returning to Chile.

Aldunate's painting evolved from geometric abstraction through a colourful, experimental 1970s phase into the black and white, psychologically charged portraits of women that made her name. From the late 1970s she cultivated an early Renaissance profile manner, often binding figures with ropes or cloths as metaphors of pain and constraint, and she framed her work as a feminist critique of women's oppression. In the 1980s and 1990s she added colour, landscape and denser detail, culminating in ambitious series such as Pecados y virtudes (1993). Her work appeared at MoMA's International Print Exhibition (1977), in Austin (1988), at Firstsite in Essex (2003) and on the Arte Chileno Traspasando Fronteras tour (2004). She taught drawing and painting at the Universidad Católica and other Chilean institutions and received prizes in Santiago (1967), Punta del Este (1978) and Cali (1981).

Aldunate spent formative years as a student and young artist in the United States before settling again in Chile. She spoke of her recurrent female sitters as "mis monas" and described women as carrying hidden memories and scars that her paintings sought to uncover with elegance, sarcasm and humour. In later life progressive eye disease limited her ability to work at the scale and detail of the 1990s, and she withdrew from painting after a final exhibition in 2024.

Carmen Aldunate died on 25 September 2026 at the age of 86. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes announced her death the same day, recalling that her paintings occupy a significant place in the museum's collection and in other important holdings. Galería Artespacio and Chilean cultural media, including El Mostrador, published tributes emphasising her singular language around the female figure. A specific place and cause of death were not detailed in the first public reports.

Aldunate is remembered as a leading Chilean painter and draughtswoman of the neo figurative current, and as an artist who turned Renaissance-inflected female portraiture into a contemporary feminist language. Museum collections in Chile and abroad, the Ralli museums' holdings of series such as Pecados y virtudes, and her late Ocaso exhibition mark a career that stayed personal even as it became commercially and critically iconic. Younger viewers continue to encounter her "monas" as emblems of psychological depth in Chilean art of the late twentieth century.