Luís Demée

Luís Luciano Demée was born in Macau in 1929 and died in Porto in 2014. A painter and teacher, he began his artistic training with the Russian architect and painter George Smirnoff, whose pupil he was between 1944 and 1945.

He held his first solo exhibition in Macau in 1951. The following year, a grant from the Caixa Escolar de Macau enabled him to enrol at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa. He continued his studies at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes do Porto, where he completed the Painting course in 1960 and began teaching in 1961. He took part in the 1st Paris Biennale in 1959, receiving a grant from the Federation of Art Critics of Paris. He also held a scholarship from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, which enabled him to work in the French capital.

His painting began with the observation of the Macau landscape, from its buildings and streets to the work of the fishermen and the presence of the sea. It gradually moved towards abstraction, focusing on the relationships between forms and colours. Geometry became a structuring element of his compositions, at times crossed by suggestions of volume, while he maintained a particular attention to the surface and to the construction of pictorial space.

He worked in acrylic, watercolour and screen printing, and also produced murals, frescoes, works on glass and tapestries. He created works for hotels and public buildings, among them the Palácio da Justiça do Sabugal.

His exhibition career included the São Paulo Biennial, the II Exposição de Artes Plásticas of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and "Porto 60/70: Os Artistas e a Cidade", at the Museu de Serralves, in 2001. That same year, he presented a retrospective at the Centro de Congressos do Estoril. Between 2006 and 2007, the Macao Museum of Art devoted to him the exhibition "Tempo Diluído: Aguarelas de Luís Luciano Demée", bringing together works from the early years of his production.

He was awarded the Prémio Nacional de Pintura Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso in 1964 and the Gold Medal of Emeritus Citizen, granted by the Government of Macau, in 1999.

His work is held in the collections of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, the Fundação de Serralves, the Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, the Museu Municipal Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and the Macao Museum of Art, as well as in private collections in Portugal and abroad.