António Areal
António Areal (Oporto, 1934 – Lisbon, 1978), was a self-taught artist – greatly due to health problems – and he had a special interest in literature and philosophy, which manifested in his painting. He began to show his work in 1952, and had his first solo exhibition in 1956. The following year, he was awarded the Drawing Prize at the Plastic Arts Exhibition of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In this first period, in his drawings and illustrations, the influence of Surrealism is prominent. Between 1960 and 1961 he lived in São Paulo, Brazil, and initiated a second period in his work, informal in nature. Finally, after 1964, started the third and perhaps richest phase of his production, of neo-figurative paintings, with a growing conceptual dimension, and the creation of three-dimensional objects, to which he associated sentences, showing a constant attitude of reflection over his work. In the beginning of the 1970’s, he started the important series of paintings O Coleccionador de Belas-Artes (The Fine Arts Collector), revealing his concern with criticism and the status of art and the artist, upon which he focused greatly in this decade. He produced theory with these thoughts, in his Criticism and Combat Texts in the vanguard of the visual arts (1970). In 1965, he was awarded the Painting Prize by Casa da Imprensa, and in 1968, the Drawing Award at the 3rd National Salon of Modern Art and the representation of Portugal at the 9th São Paulo biennial. The first retrospective exhibitions of his work occurred in 1990, at the Serralves Foundation, in Oporto, and at the Modern Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon.
FMV, June 2020
