Julião Sarmento is a Portuguese multimedia artist and painter.[1]
He was born in Lisbon (1948), studied painting and architecture at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts. He began exhibiting film, video, sound, painting, sculpture, installation and multimedia in the seventies, but also developed several significant site-specific projects.
He has exhibited his work extensively in one-man and group shows. Julião Sarmento represented Portugal at the Venice Biennial in 1997. His work is represented in several museums and private collections, including a partial room showing at London's Tate Modern museum.[2]
The work featured is largely collage-based or a combination of collage and sketched images, and range from takes on popular culture to excerpts from a love letter written by James Joyce to his wife Nora entitled Dublin-Trieste 2 December 2009 (featured at the Tate Modern). This is a series of photo-and-sketch-based work inspired by select lines from Joyce's letter. When placed together the viewer reads, "...there is also a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your body, for every secret and shameful part of it, for every odour and act of it..."
Julião Sarmento lives and works in Estoril, Portugal, with wife Isabel, and children Laura and Duarte.