Carmen Aldunate

Carmen Zita Aldunate Salas was born in Viña del Mar, Chile, on 10 February 1940. She described a "wonderfully crazy" family in which her mother, grandmother and aunts painted at home, and she kept a childhood workshop from the age of five. A French-speaking governess she called Toi lived with the family for decades and became a second maternal figure.

At seventeen she entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and later continued 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 specialised in the Department of Art at the University of California, Davis, living about seven years in the United States, where she supported herself with odd jobs while painting. After returning to Chile she taught drawing and painting at the Universidad Católica and other institutions.

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. In the 1980s flat colour, richer costume and quieter landscapes entered the pictures. The 1990s brought larger multi-figure canvases and hermetic still-life symbols, culminating in ambitious series such as Pecados y virtudes (1993).

She exhibited widely in Chile, Argentina, the United States and Europe. Landmark group appearances include MoMA's International Print Exhibition (1977), the Barbara Duncan Latin American drawings show in Austin (1988), Alternating Currents at Firstsite in Essex (2003), and Arte Chileno Traspasando Fronteras (2004). Collectors and museums made her one of Chile's most commercially recognised figurative painters, while she insisted that recognisability was a virtue rather than a flaw.

Aldunate was married for 44 years to the agronomist engineer Juan José Romero, whom she nicknamed Coté. They had two daughters: María José Romero, a painter who often exhibited with her mother, and Antonia, a lawyer. After their separation the former couple remained connected through family and animals; Aldunate lived near both daughters in later years and spoke of grandchildren and great-granddaughters.

She was a declared night owl who painted late, smoked heavily, and preferred the quiet of her studio to social openings. Long macular disease left her with useful vision in one eye for decades before later blindness ended her ability to paint conventionally. Companion and household figure Angélica, who also painted, shared her home for many years.

Carmen Aldunate died on 25 September 2026 at the age of 86. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes announced her death the same day on its social channels, recalling that her paintings occupy a significant place in the museum's collection and in other important holdings. Chilean outlets including El Mostrador, Radio Universidad de Chile, La Tercera, TVN and Hogar de Cristo published tributes. A specific official medical cause was not made public in those announcements. She had spent her final working years nearly blind, making collages from her own prints after Ocaso closed her painting career in 2024.

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 of irony, bandage and mask. Museum collections in Chile and abroad, the Ralli museums' holdings of series such as Pecados y virtudes, and the final Ocaso exhibition document a six-decade studio practice. Younger painters, including her daughter María José Romero, continued dialogues with her studio methods. After her death the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes thanked her for a language marked by the human figure and, especially, by women of deep symbolic and psychological charge.

Aldunate's formal training joined three institutions: the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, the Universidad de Chile, and a postgraduate specialisation at the University of California, Davis. The Chilean school years placed her under leading mid-century painters and printmakers, including Mario Carreño, Roser Bru, Nemesio Antúnez, Delia del Carril, Mario Toral and José Balmes. The California years widened her technical range and gave her long exposure to United States campus life before she chose to return to Chile, partly to be near aging parents, arriving around the time of the Unidad Popular.

Aldunate framed her female figures as carriers of hidden memories, masks and scars. She said painting was an act of exorcism and that she painted "the self portrait of all women". Publicly she rejected gender parity quotas as insulting to merit, criticised Chilean social dullness, and refused neat left or right labels, saying each side mistrusted her. She supported charitable art sales for Paréntesis and Hogar de Cristo and spoke warmly of friendship with the sculptor Juan Egenau and his family.

In interviews she was frank about mental health history in her family, lifelong psychiatric care, and fear of long illness rather than of sudden death. Her blunt humour and refusal of victimhood became part of her public persona.

Early distinctions include Third Prize in painting at the CAP competition of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago (1967), First Prize at the Bienal of Punta del Este (1978), and a drawing mention at the IV Bienal Americana de Artes Gráficas in Cali (1981). In 2004 she became a numbered member of the Academia Chilena de Bellas Artes of the Instituto de Chile. The Games of recognition in the market and museums were matched by repeated popular success; she was often called one of Chile's most collected living painters even when she joked that she would never receive the Premio Nacional.

In 2020 historian Patricia Arancibia Clavel published Sin corazas, a biography built from long interviews in which Aldunate discussed childhood, marriage, illness and the symbolic wardrobe of her painted women. Television and arts magazines returned to her studio across decades, from Ver el Arte in 1991 to later features on night painting with audiobooks and on the loss of sight. Her Renaissance-inflected women became a familiar decorative presence in Chilean homes and, she noted wryly, among the most frequently forged images in Chilean art.

Aldunate's commercial popularity and sharp tongue drew criticism from parts of the art world. She compared herself to Julio Iglesias to describe the gap between specialist disdain and popular affection. A The Clinic interview in which she made harsh remarks about Mapuche land politics provoked national anger; she later said her daughters begged her to stay silent in interviews. She also took combative positions against gender parity and against what she saw as empty contemporary installations, defending figurative clarity as a democratic virtue.