Juarez Machado

Juarez Busch Machado was born in Joinville, Santa Catarina, Brazil, on 16 March 1941, into a family of artists. His father was a travelling salesman and collector, so he spent much of his childhood with his mother, also an artist, and his brother Edson. According to NSC Total, his first recorded drawing, at the age of three, was a war tank sketched on a newspaper page. As a boy he drew and modelled clay figures, and as a teenager he worked at a Joinville print shop producing medicine labels, packaging and posters for the Laboratorio Catarinense.

At about 18 he moved to Curitiba and enrolled at the Escola de Musica e Belas Artes do Parana, the state school of music and fine arts. He painted his first picture for a salon of new artists in 1960 and won prizes at the Curitiba salons in 1961 and 1962, including first place for drawing and sculpture at the Salao de Iniciantes, and a gold medal at the 16th Salao de Primavera in 1964. That same year he held his first solo show at the Galeria Cocaco in Curitiba.

In the mid 1960s he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he lived for around twenty years. He became a cartoonist for major newspapers, among them the Jornal do Brasil, where he signed the humour column Nonsense. At TV Globo he worked for more than two decades. From 1973 he had his own segment on Fantastico, appearing with a white painted face as a mime who interacted with his own drawn scenery, which made him a pioneer of humour drawing on Brazilian television. He designed sets and costumes for programmes including Faca Humor nao Faca Guerra, Balanca mas nao Cai and Balao Magico, created the sets and costumes for Roberto Carlos's first TV special in 1974 and worked on music videos and specials for Elis Regina, Raul Seixas and Emilio Santiago. He also drew the opening titles of the 1971 film Uma Pantera em Minha Cama.

In the late 1970s he turned fully to painting and travelled with his work to New York, London and Paris. In the 1980s he made Paris his home, with a studio in Montmartre on the rue des Abbesses, while keeping studios in Joinville and Rio de Janeiro. His canvases, marked by irreverence, social humour and a light surrealism, featured elegant women, bicycles, umbrellas and cafe scenes. He exhibited frequently in Europe and the United States and became one of the most commercially successful Brazilian painters abroad. He also worked in sculpture, engraving, illustration, photography and writing.

According to eBiografia, Machado was married to Melina Mosimann, who was 27 years younger, served for years as administrative director of his institute and died of cancer on 18 June 2020. He had three children from earlier marriages, whose names have not been widely reported. His brother Edson Busch Machado co-founded the Instituto Internacional Juarez Machado with him. In his last years he lived in the interior of Rio de Janeiro state.

Machado saw humour as a serious tool. "I work a lot with mockery; humour is a critical form that provokes and amuses," he said. He described his television work as drawing with the body, calling himself a draughtsman of gesture, and said that painting was a kind of courtship with the canvas, something he would not begin without first bathing. He spoke often about art outliving the artist, saying that only art is eternal.

In Joinville his ceramic mural O Grande Circo, unveiled in 1998 on the Centreventos Cau Hansen, became one of the city's best known landmarks, and the Teatro Juarez Machado inside the complex opened in 2001. In 2014 he opened the Instituto Internacional Juarez Machado in his parents' former home on Rua Lages, a non profit centre that keeps his collection and exhibits other artists, expanded with a new building in 2018. A documentary, Juarez Machado: Memorias e Reflexoes, was screened at the Teatro Juarez Machado on 30 September 2026, a week before his death. Tributes came from the Joinville city government, the Fundacao Catarinense de Cultura, the Bolshoi Theatre School in Brazil, Joinville Esporte Clube and artists' associations.

His honours included an international prize at the 5th Biennial of Humour in Art in Italy (1969), awards for television set design in Rio (1969 and 1974), the Barriga Verde visual arts prize of Santa Catarina (1977), the Nakamori international prize for best children's book in Japan (1977), honorary citizenship of Joinville (1982), the Medal of Merit of the Order of Rio Branco (1990), a medal of honour from Champs-sur-Marne, France (1990), the Anita Garibaldi Order of Merit in Florianopolis (1998), Joinville's Princesa Dona Francisca Medal of Merit (2015), the Lide Cultura prize (2023) and Knight of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2024).

Notable exhibitions included Soixante-Dix at the Museu de Arte de Santa Catarina in Florianopolis in 2012, marking his 70th birthday with more than 55 works, and Juarez Machado na Hora do Recreio in Curitiba in 2015, with around 200 pieces. His Fantastico segments remain widely shared, and in 2026 the Instituto produced the 40 minute documentary Juarez Machado: Memorias e Reflexoes.

Machado had been living with Alzheimer's disease. He had been in the Hospital Universitario de Vassouras, Rio de Janeiro state, for about a month and was recovering from pneumonia when he suffered a heart attack at around 5:50 pm on Tuesday 6 October 2026, according to ND+ and Jornal Nacional. He was 85. His family and the Instituto Internacional Juarez Machado confirmed the death, and Joinville mayor Rejane Gambin declared three days of official mourning. Funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of the first reports.