José Loureiro
José Loureiro (Mangualde, 1961) completed the Painting course at the Lisbon Superior School of Fine Artes, in 1987, and in the same year he started showing his work. His first solo exhibition – José se quiseres comes as sardinhas todas [José if you want you can eat all the sardines] – was at Ether Gallery, in 1988, followed by the exhibition Lumaréu, in the same year, at Galeria Diferença. From then on, he has been showing his work regularly in Portugal and abroad, namely the participation in the group exhibitions Portuguese Contemporary Art in the collection of Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1992), Ida e Volta (Baía Modern Art Museum, Brazil, 1999), EDP Art, 1st edition of the Painting and Drawing EDP Prize (Palácio da Ajuda, 2000), Contemporary Art from Portugal (European Central Bank, Frankfurt, 2002), Figuração e Desfiguração: Inventário de gestos, narrativas e retratos (Serralves Museum, Oporto, 2003), among others. His work was also present at other important institutions, such as the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Lisboa), the Museo Extremeno y Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (Badajoz). In his works, the idea of painting itself is key. He produces painting about painting and about the possibilities that this medium offers. He is interested in the gestures, the paints, colours and materiality of the medium, as well as the representations that can come up from the conjugation of these elements. In a process between abstraction and figuration, the visual field and the shapes that inhabit it are constructed by a superposition of layers, or coloured lines, that shape the space through movement. In 2011, Culturgest organised the retrospective exhibition of drawings As Piores Flores: Desenho 1990-1996 [The Worst Flowers: Drawing 1990-1996]. His most recent exhibitions include Isótopo (Galerie Maubert, Paris, 2018), Linha, Forma e Cor [Line, Shape and Colour] (Berardo Museum, Lisbon, 2018); Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Municipal Museum, Amarante, 2020) and A Vocação dos Ácaros (Carmona e Costa Foundation, Lisbon, 2018), which won the AICA prize for the best exhibition of the year. His work is represented in various institutional and private collections.
FMV, October 2020
