Ângelo de Sousa
Mozambique, 1938 – Portugal, 2011
Ângelo de Sousa was born in Lourenço Marques in 1938. In 1962, he completed the course of Painting at the School of Fine Arts of Porto. Between 1967 and 1968 he attended the St. Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, in London. During this period he became interested in the potential of film and photography. His approach to different media – painting, drawing, engraving, sculpture, film and photography – was always experimental and dictated by the dynamics and results of the work process itself. The economy of means and forms, as well as the experimentation on variations within series, are characteristics of the work of Ângelo de Sousa. In his painting, elementariness is visible in the use of only black, white and the three primary colors. This principle of his program is explained by the artist: “a maximum of effect with a minimum of resources”.
Helena Almeida
Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 1934 – Sintra, 2018) completed the degree in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon in 1955 and exhibited regularly since the late 1960s. Her first solo exhibition was in 1967 at Galeria Buchholz, in Lisbon.
Throughout her career, Helena Almeida questioned the traditional artistic media, in particular painting, a discipline from which she explored other disciplines, such as drawing, performance, video and photography. In her early works, the artist reflects on the materiality and limits of the pictorial space, working the canvas in an unconventional way, such as painting its back or adding everyday objects to it. Following those initial works, the artist found in photography the ideal medium to explore the tension between her work and her body, an ever-present theme in her artistic thinking that lead her to resort to self-representation, for which she became known nationally and internationally.
Helena Almeida represented Portugal at the Biennales of São Paulo (1979), Venice (1982 and 2004) and Sidney (2004) and had important solo exhibitions in Portugal and abroad.
Ângela Ferreira
Ângela Ferreira was born in 1958 in Maputo, Mozambique. She completed Fine Arts studies in South Africa, obtaining a Master’s degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art of the University of Cape Town. She currently lives and works in Lisbon, teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, where she obtained a PhD in 2016. The work of Ângela Ferreira revolves around the impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on contemporary society. Her sculptural, sound and video tributes have constant references to the economic, political and cultural history of the African continent through the use of images and works of some unexpected figures such as Bob Dylan, Peter Blum, Carlos Cardoso, Ingrid Jonker, Jimi Hendrix, Jorge Ben Jor, Diego Rivera, Miriam Makeba, Angela Davis or Forough Farrokhzad.
Augusto Alves da Silva
Portugal, 1963
Augusto Alves da Silva was born in 1963 in Lisbon. With two scholarships from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, he obtained his B.A. (Hons) in Photography from the London College of Printing (1989) and completed his M.F.A. in Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1997). Using photography, but also video and installation, the work he has developed over the last twenty years shows that he is one of the artists with a more critical view of the contemporary media landscape. In a series of projects, he offers the viewers of his work some of the most ironic and disenchanted images on the forms – architectural, spatial planning – that a certain ideal of progress has brought to our country in recent decades. Determined to alert the visitors of his exhibitions to the state of apathy in which we consume images today, the artist believes that studied inclusion of dissonant or disturbing elements in an apparently clear regime as is photography can lead the spectator to a state of distrust that results in active contemplation.
Edgar Martins
Portugal, 1977
Edgar Martins (born in Évora) grew up in Macau, China. In 1996 he moved to London, where he studied at the University of the Arts and the Royal College of Art. Landscape, place, space and architecture, as well as political, social and human issues became the predominant themes in his photographic imagery. In previous works, Martins has used photography to develop a philosophical and quasi-scientific investigation, examining various minimalist concepts of the contemporary urban landscape. Moving between the factual and the fictional, between the concrete and the metaphorical, the artist operates within a landscape of uncertainty, permanent flux, transition and opposition. His work maintains a close and subtle dialogue with the traditions of topography and landscape photography, with a connection to cinema, painting and sculpture.
Filipa César
Portugal, 1975
Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the fictional aspects of documentary, in the porous borders between cinema and its reception, and in the politics and poetics inherent to the moving image and image technologies. Since 2011, she has been investigating the origins of the African Liberation Movement cinema in Guinea-Bissau as a laboratory of resistance to dominant epistemologies. The resulting body of work comprises 16mm films, digital archives, videos, seminars, exhibitions, publications, ongoing collaborations with artists, theorists and activists, and is the basis of her PhD thesis at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the University Nova of Lisbon. Filipa César’s work bridges the gap between contemporary and historical discourses in her film and video work, as well as in her publications.
João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva
Portugal, 1979 and 1977
João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva met while attending the course of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon. In their artistic practice, they explore extensively various media, including photography, sculpture, writing, installation and, in particular, 16mm film. The fusion between art and science is a unique and constant feature in their projects, as is the use of absurdity, humor and illusion tricks. Gusmão and Paiva build narratives that often present natural and physical phenomena or even doubts about human perception and faculties. During their journey, they held multiple national and international exhibitions. In 2004, they were awarded the EDP New Artists Prize and, in 2009, they were one of the youngest artists ever to represent Portugal at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Susanne S. D. Themlitz
Lisbon, 1968
Of Portuguese-German origin, Susanne Themlitz began her artistic training in 1987 with Drawing and Sculpture studies at Ar.Co. – Centre for Art and Visual Communication, in Lisbon, having completed the course in 1993. Before that, through an exchange program in 1992, she studied for a year at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1995, she completed an MFA (Meisterchüler) at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf with a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. She has exhibited regularly since 1992, mainly in Portugal and Germany, and her first solo exhibition was in 1996. Susanne Themlitz’s work is characterized by interdisciplinarity, using different materials and techniques, such as sculpture, photography, drawing, painting and video. She has been awarded in all these fields. She lives and works between Lisbon and Cologne.
Julião Sarmento
Portugal, 1948 – 2021
Julião Sarmento was born in 1948 in Lisbon, and lived and worked in Estoril, Portugal. He studied Painting and Architecture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. During his career, Sarmento worked with different mediums: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, film, video, performance, sound and installation. He also developed different site-specific projects. He had numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world over the past five decades. Julião Sarmento represented Portugal at the 46th Venice Biennale (1997). He participated in the Documenta 7 (1982) and Documenta 8 (1987), the Venice Biennale (1980 and 2001) and the São Paulo Biennale in 2002. His work is represented in several public and private collections in North and South America, Europe and Japan.
André Cepeda
Portugal, 1976
André Cepeda was born in Coimbra in 1976. He currently lives and works in Lisbon. He attended the course of Photography at the École des Arts d’Ixelles in Brussels (1995-1996) and began to exhibit his work regularly in Portugal and abroad from 1999 onwards. His artistic practice is attentive to everyday spaces, some forgotten and others rejected. Cepeda seeks to build new ways of looking at reality, as well as create new contexts for the images. The series Ontem [Yesterday] (2010) follows the lives of inhabitants located in the most marginalized outskirts of the city of Porto, and brings together images of landscapes, interiors and portraits. He is the founder of the Blues Photography Studio, which produces works of photography, printing, digitization and image treatment for various artists and institutions.
Júlia Ventura
Portugal, 1952
Júlia Ventura graduated in Painting from the School of Fine Arts of Lisbon and studied Video Art at the Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Her work asks some of the most important postmodernist historical and ontological questions about photographic representation. Using mainly the potential for representation and the reproducibility of photography, and more recently video and painting, her work explores the lexicon of sexual and imagery stereotypes that surround female representation, influential in the course of the artistic and photographic discourse itself. The artist works on the concept of imagery matrix, its massification and otherness, deconstructing its components, creating paradoxes and dialectics that denounce the patriarchal heritage in the construction of the female image and disarticulating the verist legacy of photographic genesis.
Sara & André
Portugal, 1980 e 1979
Sara & André studied Set and Costume Design at the Superior School of Theater and Cinema of Lisbon and Visual Arts at the School of Fine Arts and Design of Caldas das Rainha, respectively. They have been exhibiting regularly since 2006. In their artistic practice, they use different mediums such as photography, performance and video. The work developed by the artists explores issues related to the authorship, appropriation, legitimization and recognition of the work of art. The reinterpretation of the notions of work or artist is a constant in their production, which often tests, in an ironic and critical tone, the elasticity of the frontiers of contemporary art. Following the exhibition cycle Curated Curators at Zaratan – Arte Contemporânea in 2017, of which they were curators, they edited the book Uma Breve História da Curadoria [A Brief History of Curatorship] (Documenta, Lisbon, 2019).
Carla Cruz
Artist, researcher and university professor (EAAD – UMINHO), Carla Cruz lives in Porto. She obtained a PhD in Artistic Practices from the Goldsmiths University of London, with a grant from the FCT [Foundation for Science and Technology]. In 2016, she was awarded an Associate Research Fellowship by the AHRC Cultural Engagement Fund, focusing on the London community center The Mill. She has been developing the Finding Money project with Antonio Contador since 2011, and since 2007 has been coordinating the Associação de Amigos da Praça do Anjo with Ângelo Ferreira de Sousa. She co-founded the artistic intervention feminist collective ZOiNA (1999-2004), and the Associação Caldeira 213 (1999-2002); between 2005 and 2013, she coordinated the feminist exhibition project All My Independent Wo/men.
Gonçalo Pena
Lisbon, 1967
Gonçalo Pena graduated in Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts of Lisbon in 1993. He finished the Master’s degree in Communication Sciences at the University Nova of Lisbon in 2001. From 1993 to 2004 he stands out as an illustrator in newspapers and magazines (Independente, Público, Ler, Livros, Egoísta and others) and received the Single Illustration Award from the Society for News Design in 2001. Teacher at the School of Fine Arts and Design of Caldas das Rainha from 1996 to 2005, the year in which he decided to dedicate himself exclusively to his work as a visual artist. Mousse Publishing has published his three books, “Monkey Trip”, “Unfinished Mandarin” and “Barber Shop”, vast collections of drawings that merge religion, history and ancient mythology with political philosophy and social issues.
Ana Vieira
Coimbra, 1940
Ana Vieira grew up on the island of São Miguel, in the Azores. In 1964, she graduated in Painting from the School of Fine Arts of Lisbon. With collective exhibitions since 1965, she held his first solo exhibition – Imagens ausentes [Absent images] – in 1968, at Galeria Quadrante (Lisbon). She participated in the famous exhibition Alternativa Sero, organized by Ernesto de Sousa in 1977. Her work is represented in several collections, namely in the Modern Art Center of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and in the Serralves Foundation, an institution that dedicated an anthological exhibition to her in 1998-1999.