Ângelo de Sousa (Mozambique, 1938 – Oporto, 2011) moved to Oporto at seventeen years old, with a grant from Lourenço Marques to study fine arts. He completed the painting course at the Oporto Fine Arts School, between 1955 and 1963, a school where he taught for more than three decades and where he was the first professor. He finished the course with the highest final classification of twenty points (on twenty), as did his colleagues Armando Alves, Jorge Pinheiro and José Rodrigues; together they would form “The Four Twenties” group, who’s action, between 1968 and 1972, was essentially an organized dissemination strategy of their productions. In 1964, the four members founded the Árvore Cooperative. In 1959, he had his first painting exhibition at Divulgação Gallery, in Oporto, and his works were shown together with those of Almada Negreiros. In the following decade, he began his sculptural production, first with acrylic, then with iron, steel and aluminium, among other materials. His artistic production extended to photography, cinema, scenography, figuration and book illustration. This multidisciplinary activity reflects the essential characteristic of his work which, more than defining an individual style, constantly aimed at the experimentation of new media and techniques. In his painting work, integrated within the scope of minimalism, he essentially explored the potentialities of colour and its shades. Between 1967 and 1968, he enriched his education in London, where he attended St. Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, as a grantee of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the British Council. Back in Portugal, in 1972, he was awarded an honourable mention of the AICA/SOQUIL award and, in 1975 he received an award at the XIII São Paulo Biennale. He also received the Painting Award at the III Exhibition of Plastic Arts of the Gulbenkian, in 1986, and the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Award, in 2007. His work had various retrospective exhibitions, namely at the Serralves Contemporary Art Museum and at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Ângelo de Sousa is represented in the main national collections and in various collections abroad.
Francisca Morais Vaz
