Jorge Martins

Jorge Martins was born in Lisbon in 1940. Between 1957 and 1961 he attended the architecture and painting courses at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa. He held his first solo exhibition in 1960 at Galeria Gravura in Lisbon.

In 1961 he settled in Paris, where he mixed with artists such as Júlio Pomar, Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes and the members of the KWY group. Between 1975 and 1976 he lived in New York, deepening the investigation into light that would come to occupy a central place in his work. He returned to Portugal for good in 1991, settling in Lisbon.

His work develops between abstraction and figuration, with particular attention to the relationships between light, shadow, form and space. Drawing constitutes a field of permanent experimentation, bringing together marks that range from geometry to expressive gesture, from the patch of colour to writing. The diversity of these solutions accompanies a research into the possibilities of the image and of representation, which extends to painting, engraving, illustration, tapestry and sculpture.

In 1978 the Musée national d’art moderne, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, devoted the exhibition "Dessins" to him. He was part of the Portuguese representation at the 18th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo in 1985, and was the subject of important exhibitions at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, among them the anthological drawing exhibition of 1988 and the painting retrospective of 1993. He also held solo exhibitions at Culturgest in 2001 and at the Centro Cultural de Belém in 2006.

In 2013 the Museu de Serralves and the Fundação Carmona e Costa presented, simultaneously, "A Substância do Tempo", an extensive retrospective of drawings made over more than five decades. This was followed by "Sombras e Paradoxos", at the MEIAC in Badajoz in 2018 and at the MARCO in Vigo in 2019. In 2026 he presented "Timescape" at the Torreão Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional in Lisbon, bringing together recent painting and drawing.

He received the Prémio Gulbenkian de Ilustração de Literatura Infantil for the "Livro das Sete Cores" in 1984, and the Drawing Prize of the III Exposição de Artes Plásticas of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in 1986.

His work is held in various institutional collections, among them those of the Centro de Arte Moderna of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, the MACAM and the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento.