José Escada

José Escada (Lisbon, 1934-1980) began his career in the mid-1950s, working intensely with architects, mainly through the Movement for the Renewal of Religious Art, and as an illustrator and critic. In 1960 he settled in Paris on a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation grant, deepened his abstraction and joined the KWY group, alongside René Bértholo, Lourdes Castro, António Costa Pinheiro, Gonçalo Duarte and João Vieira. The Paris period, the longest and most active of his career, produced dense figurative works of outlined figures, three-dimensional cut-outs and collages. In the 1970s his work turned to the oppressed and then liberated body, and by the end of the decade it became more figurative and autobiographical.