Fernando de Azevedo

Fernando de Azevedo was born in Vila Nova de Gaia in 1923 and died in Lisbon in 2002. He attended the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts between 1935 and 1940 and then enrolled in the Painting course at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, which he soon abandoned. In the early 1940s he took part in the gatherings at the Hermínius café.

He showed at the 1st and 2nd General Exhibitions of Fine Arts in 1946 and 1947, linked to the neo-realist aesthetic, from which he later distanced himself. Drawn to Surrealism, he was one of the founders of the Lisbon Surrealist Group, formed in 1947, taking part in the group’s exhibition in 1949 and in its other activities, such as the cadavre exquis painted collectively in 1948 with Vespeira, António Pedro, António Domingues and Moniz Pereira. In 1952 he exhibited with Marcelino Vespeira and Fernando Lemos at Casa Jalco.

He worked in drawing, painting and collage, his "occultations" being the most distinctive works of his career. From the 1950s he moved towards abstraction through non-figuration, automatism and gesturalism, with a phase of lyrical abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s. His work, strongly poetic and inward-looking, centres on the image and its metamorphic potential, in a dreamlike and lyrical vein. His notable works include "Paisagem" (1970), made for the café A Brasileira in 1971. He also worked in advertising, book covers, posters, stage design and costume design.

Alongside this he was highly active as an art critic from the second half of the 1940s, writing for the newspapers "Mundo Literário" and "Horizonte - Jornal das Artes" and later for the magazine "Colóquio. Revista de Artes e Letras", and was also art director of "Colóquio Artes". He worked with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation from 1962, directed its Fine Arts Department and was an adviser to the Gulbenkian Ballet. He was president of the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes from 1979 to 2002, of the Portuguese printmakers’ cooperative "Gravura" and of the Portuguese Section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), of which he was also vice-president.

He received several prizes, including the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Grand Prize in 1999. In 2013 the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Modern Art Centre presented "Razões Imprevistas", his first retrospective, with some 250 works, curated by Leonor Nazaré.

His work is held in the collections of the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, which includes "Personagens preciosas" and "Ocultação", and of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Modern Art Centre.