Júlio Pomar

Júlio Pomar (Lisbon, 1926 - 2018) was one of the central figures of twentieth-century Portuguese art, developing over more than seven decades a body of work profoundly marked by experimentation, continual reinvention and a refusal of fixed languages. Based in Paris from 1963, he built an international career spanning painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, illustration, ceramics, tapestry and public commissions.

After training at the Escolas de Belas-Artes of Lisbon and Porto, he established himself as one of the key figures of Portuguese neo-realism, taking an active part in the cultural and political life of the post-war years. His early work, marked by social engagement and by the depiction of labour and the human condition, evolved progressively towards freer investigations of the body, movement, memory and the construction of the image.

Pomar's artistic practice is often organised in thematic cycles, in which each series corresponds to new formal languages and new ways of looking. From the Tauromaquias, Les Courses and the series devoted to rugby, to the portraits, the tigers, the literary universes or the works made out of his experience of Brazil and the Amazon, he built an output in permanent transformation, marked by intense gesture, formal fragmentation and extraordinary pictorial freedom.

Over the course of his career he took part in important international events, including several editions of the Bienal de São Paulo, held major retrospectives at institutions such as the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, the Centro Cultural de Belém and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, and received numerous distinctions, among them the Prémio AICA-SEC, the Prémio Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and the Prémio Celpa/Vieira da Silva.

Alongside his painting, he was intensely active as a writer, illustrator and essayist, sustaining throughout his life a critical reflection on art, literature and the image. Today Júlio Pomar remains an essential figure of Portuguese modernity, recognised for the breadth of his work and for his singular capacity to reinvent painting again and again.