José de Guimarães

José de Guimarães, the artistic name of José Maria Fernandes Marques, was born in Guimarães in 1939. He adopted the name of his home town as a pseudonym. He trained as an engineer and began his artistic education in Lisbon, attending painting classes and studying engraving at the Sociedade Cooperativa de Gravadores Portugueses from 1958 onwards.

His time in Angola, which began in 1967 during his military service, was decisive for the development of his work. Contact with the artistic expressions and visual communication systems of the peoples of Cabinda led him to construct the "Alfabeto Africano", a repertoire of signs that became the basis of his language. The fragmentation and recombination of these elements allowed him to establish relationships between European and African references.

Travels to Japan, China and Mexico broadened this investigation, which also found inspiration in the painting of Rubens and the literature of Camões. Hybrid figures, intense colours and humour run through his painting and graphic work. In the 1980s he deepened the relationship between painting and sculpture, creating pieces cut out and painted on both faces, using paper he made himself and fibreglass.

His career includes numerous international exhibitions. Among the most notable are the presentations at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1987, at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and the Fundação de Serralves in 1992, and at the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo in 2006. In 2019 the Musée Würth in Erstein, France, presented a retrospective that placed his artistic production in dialogue with the collection of African art he had assembled. That same year, the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal hosted "A Volta ao Mundo", devoted to his graphic work.

His activity extends to public art, with interventions in several countries. In 1993 he created the symbol for the tourism promotion of Portugal, one of the most widely recognised applications of his visual vocabulary.

He was made a Commander of the Order of Infante Dom Henrique in 1990, received the Visual Arts Prize of the International Association of Art Critics in 1992, and the Lifetime Achievement Prize of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores in 2019. In 2012 he was elected president of the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes.

In 2012 the Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães was inaugurated as part of Guimarães European Capital of Culture. Its holdings bring together works by the artist and pieces from his collections of African, pre-Columbian and ancient Chinese art, placed there on loan, giving expression to the relationship between artistic creation and collecting that has accompanied his career.