Augusto Barros

Augusto Ferreira Barros was born in Lisbon in 1929 and died in the same city in 1998. He studied at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes. In 1959 he went to Germany on a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation grant and studied under Hans Thiemann at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts.

In 1963 he settled in Paris, where he lived until the early 1990s and mixed with figures such as Man Ray, Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes, Manuel Cargaleiro and Serge Poliakoff. His painting is known for its abstract forms in soft tones, above all whites and bluish greys, and found a central reference in Poliakoff.

He held his first solo exhibition in 1962 at the Galerie Commeter in Hamburg and his second in 1963 at the Galerie des Jeunes in Paris. His first group exhibition, "Augusto Barros e Álvaro Pereira", took place at the Galeria Nacional de Arte in Lisbon in 1964. Towards the end of his life he presented "Works from the 60s and 70s" at Galeria de São Bento in Lisbon and took part in "Pintura e Escultura" in Beja, both in 1997.

His work is represented in European museums and in private collections in Portugal and abroad, including MACAM, which holds six of his works, among them "A Foice e o Martelo" (1960).