Vitor Pomar

Vítor Pomar (Lisbon, 1949) began his artistic trajectory at the Oporto and Lisbon Schools of Fine Arts, where he attended, between 1966 and 1969, the Painting course, while maintaining a parallel practice of photography and engraving. He had his first solo exhibition at Quadrante Gallery, in 1970, and in the same year he left for Holland where he stayed until 1985. With a financing programme from the Dutch government, he studied at the Rotterdam and Hague Academies. During this period, he established and original artistic concept, producing a series of acrylics marked by the sole use of black and white that came about through his expressionist researches. He also started making videos, recording the activities carried out in his studio and the city that surrounded him. Although an émigré, he did not lose touch with his home town, participating in the Alternativa Zero exhibition, in 1977, and in the grand painting exhibition of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in 1980. In 1985, when he returned to Portugal, he temporarily interrupted his artistic practice, but continued to make solo exhibitions with previous works. During this period, he created and managed the Álvaro de Campos house-museum (Tavira, 1987) and dedicated himself to the study of various oriental practices and philosophies, such as Zen Buddhism. In the following decade, he resumed his artistic activity, using multiple media and techniques – from documental coloured photographs, to installations, to sculpture and painting, which he immediately began to show. Abandoning the black and white of the initial works, the researches of this new phase have a spiritual and mystical dimension, which would increase in expression in his work, frequently in the form of sentences, that he inscribed both in paintings and in drawings and photos. In 2003, his work received the 2002 EDP Art Prize and in 2011, the Modern Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation organised a retrospective exhibition of his film and video work.

 

FMV, September 2020