Celeste Maia

Celeste Maia was born in Mozambique in 1941. She studied Art History at the Sorbonne in Paris and completed a master's degree in Fine Arts at the University of Maryland in the United States. She taught Art History at the universities of Maryland and Brasília, at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, also in São Paulo.

Her figurative painting develops out of the observation of people, spaces and everyday gestures. Her early portraits were followed by compositions in which the human presence is often suggested by objects, clothes or unoccupied interiors. Travel and contact with different cultures feed this universe, in which photography serves as the starting point for images that combine observed places and imagined elements.

In 1980 she held her first exhibition in Portugal, at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, bringing together paintings produced in São Paulo, Washington and Prague. The show was later presented at the Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis in Porto. She returned to the Gulbenkian in 1984 with a group of fourteen oil paintings on the theme of doors, depicted at life size as passages to other realities.

In 1994 she presented the exhibition "Maia. Sob o Fascínio da China" at the Centro de Arte Moderna, the outcome of a two-month journey through China, Macau and Hong Kong. The some thirty paintings brought together there explored the encounter between traditions, urban transformations and scenes of everyday life. The exhibition then travelled on to Madrid, Seville, Macau, Hong Kong and Beijing.

Her practice subsequently opened up to abstraction and to watercolour, in a body of work that the artist relates to the visual memories of Africa, through colour, line and pattern. In 2010 she held a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, on an artist's residency in Umbria, Italy.

Alongside painting, she devotes herself to writing, to the illustration of children's books and to the making of artist's books. In 2015 she was responsible for the international curatorship of the exhibition "CIBA: Cascais International Book Art" at the Casa de Santa Maria in Cascais. That same year, her artist's book "Resistência" received a prize from the Asociación Española de Pintores y Escultores.

Her work is part of the collection of the Centro de Arte Moderna of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, which holds the paintings "Intervalo", of 1978, and "Just Anticipation", of 1979.