EXHIBITION
Teatro dos Figuras and Trem Gallery welcome work by Manuel Baptista
The exhibition “relevos” by the artist Manuel Baptista opens next October 09, at 6:00 p.m., at the Teatro das Figuras. On the same day, and in the Trem Gallery, the Algarve artist also introduces the exhibition “desenhos”.
The exhibition at the Teatro das Figuras is made up of a series of works done with scraps of fabric, the development of research he has done in painting and drawing since the 1960s. In this selection, on show in the theatre’s foyer, the artist stresses the sculptural dimension of his obsessive organic or geometric forms, revealing to us a series of “wall sculptures”, protected by see-through boxes, in which he gives us cut out reliefs, perhaps landscapes, for the viewer’s imagination to fill with meaning.
In the Trem Gallery, the viewer has access to the series of the artist’s drawings, which, according to Mirian Tavares, are characterised “by the idea of deconstruction and re-composition of surfaces”, in an “intersection between the landscape, that is only suggested, and a strong ornamental tendency”, inviting you to see lines “at times robust, at others delicate, that fill the blank with their anxieties”.
About the artist: Manuel Baptista was born in Faro. In 1957 he moved to Lisbon, where he attended the architecture course at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1962. In that same year he moved to Paris as a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship holder, and lived there until 1963. In 1968 he lived in Ravenna, Italy, with a scholarship from the Institute of High Culture. Between 1964 and 1972 he was Assistant Professor of Painting at ESBAL.~
In 1972 he created a piece on wooden panels for the Sacavém branch of the Banco Nacional Ultramarino. Two years later, in 1974, he participated in the collective painting commemorating the April Revolution held at the Gallery of Modern Art, in Belém. In 1988 he presented his first retrospective of drawing and painting (1956-1988) at the Convento do Espírito Santo, Loulé. He has directed the Trem and Arco Municipal Galleries since 1990. He did a retrospective of his painting (1963-1990) at the National Society of Fine Arts, Lisbon and an anthological exhibition in 1996 at Casa da Cerca – Contemporary Art Centre, Almada. In the same year he produced the first artwork studies for Quinta das Conchas station, Lumiar, on Lisbon’s metro line.
He has held more than three dozen solo exhibitions and appeared in almost forty collective exhibitions. Among other awards, the artist has received the Soquil Arts Prize (1970), the Arus Prize for Painting (1982, the 1st Arus National Modern Art Exhibition), the Painting Grand Prix at the 4th International Art Biennial of Vila Nova de Cerveira (1984), BANIF Prize for Painting (1993) and with the anthological exhibition “Fora de Escala” at the Electricity Museum in Lisbon, he was awarded by the Portuguese Society of Authors for best exhibition of 2011.
View the info sheet here.
