António Dacosta
António Dacosta (1914, Angra do Heroísmo, Portugal – 1990, Paris, France) studied painting at the Lisbon Superior School of Fine Arts, in Portugal. He began by publishing critic articles in Diário Popular and exhibited for the first time in 1940 with António Pedro (1909, Cidade da Praia, Cabo Verde – 1966, Caminha, Portugal) and Pamela Boden (1905, Derbyshire, UK – 1981, Inverness, USA), at Casa Repe, in Lisbon, in an Surrealist attitude of thematic and formal freedom, at odds with the aesthetic archetypes of the Etát Noveau present in the Exposição do Mundo Português [Portuguese World Exhibition].
His pictorial work is divided in two different periods: between 1939 and 1948 within surrealism and after 1975, when the influence of surrealism and its poetic matrix appeared diluted in a renewed and more abstract language. During this interruption of more or less 30 years, Dacosta dedicated himself to poetry and art critic, as correspondent for the newspapers Estado de São Paulo e Diário Popular.
From 1974 onwards he lived in Paris, where he got in touch with the French surrealist group, subscribing the Rupture inaugurale manifest, in July 1974.
In 1942 he received the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso award with the painting A Festa [The Party], and in 1984 he was awarded the National Plastic Arts Prize.
In 1988, he held a retrospective exhibition at the José de Azeredo Perdigão Modern Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon, and at Casa de Serralves, in Oporto, Portugal; he also had exhibitions at the 2nd Biennale of São Paulo, Brazil (1953); at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Paris (1968); at the Royal Academy, London, United Kingdom (1978), among others.
António Dacosta is represented in various collections and museums, namely: Secretaria de Estado da Cultura [Office of Culture), Lisbon; Soares dos Reis National Museum, Oporto; José de Azeredo Perdigão Modern Art Centre, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon; Carlos Machado Museum, Ponta Delgada, Portugal; Angra do Heroísmo Museum, Portugal; Horta Museum, Portugal.
PS, September 2020
