Albuquerque Mendes

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Albuquerque Mendes (Trancoso, Portugal, 1953) is a Portuguese artist at the forefront of those artists who emerged during the period between the mid 70s and early 80s. Painting, performance and installation cross in a body of work that continually and ironically questions the contexts of art history as well as some of the iconographic myths of Portuguese culture and society. His performances are normally rituals reminiscent of the processions and events, both religious and profane that are part of Portuguese popular culture. HIs paintings is divided among themes and genres that recur through his work. The self-portrait, the portraits of girls and soldiers, flower vases, landscape, as well as explicit sexual situations dominate a pictorial work that uses references and the acknowledgment of various grammars characteristic of 20th century art history such as the dada collage, expressionist painting, "bad painting", the language of the "Fluxus" movement, etc.

Having belonged to the "Grupo Puzzle" he founded, with Gerardo Burmester, the "Espaco Lusitano", in Porto, one of the most dynamic spaces for the revelation of young Portuguese artist in the mid 80s. in recent years, his work has been frequently presented at the most prestigious museums and galleries in Brazil, where he is one of the best known Portuguese artist.

Through the 1980s, all the iconography used by Albuquerque confirmed his status s an iconoclast. Nowhere was more evident than in his extensive obsessive portrait groups of nuns, girls and self-portrsits that the artist is still producing today.

In the 1990s, the artist produced increasingly spare painting, where the composition between figure and background became more sophisticated and subtle. The paintings are almost abstract, at times, in the spareness of their figuration and the intensity of their representation. All Albuquerque's work is now condensed in a pictorial offering, in which the body of the artist blends with his body of work,, the back and front of a vast labour that stages its own dramaturgy through moving colser to the spectator, art theory and life theory that, in his painting, come together in a permanent challenge.