Faro: Galeria Trem exhibits «Continuing to (re)discover Teresa Sousa (1928-1962)»

The exhibition resumes the rediscovery of this artist and her work that began in 2022, with the engraving exhibition at the National Library of Portugal. The exhibition, an anthological retrospective, also presents drawings and paintings, some of which have not been exhibited for over 60 years, a tapestry and reveals works never before shown to the public.

Teresa Sousa was born in Lisbon in December 1928. After her high school studies, in 1947 she began a Higher Education Course in Painting at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts (ESBAL), which she completed in 1954 with a “final grade of 20 points”.

Despite having distinguished herself as an engraver and having been a pioneer of modern engraving in Portugal, with frequent participation in exhibitions of her artistic activity, in the country and abroad, Teresa Sousa is, even today, a little-known name in the panorama of visual arts in Portugal.

During the time she worked as a visual artist, from 1955 to 1961, Teresa Sousa was quite prolific, recognized and awarded, but her premature death, in January 1962, at just 33 years old, interrupted a career that looked promising.

The few pieces of information about the artist found in specialist literature are mostly related to the engraving prize awarded to her at the 1st Visual Arts Exhibition of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1957), with the Galeria Pórtico, of which she was a founder and promoter, and as an engraving artist in the early years of Gravura – Sociedade Cooperativa de Gravadores Portugueses.

Teresa Sousa's visual work finds its own place in the way in which her period of production, brief and suddenly interrupted, but intense, concentrated the crossroads that at the time moved the designs of Portuguese art.

In a short period of time, it evolved from a modernist stylization (assumed in the synthesis and conciseness of lines and color planes), experimented with abstraction (a necessary issue for the avant-garde consciousness of the time, even if in a transition from plastic experience and artistic updating) and also launched itself into the approach of new figurative situations.

The curatorship of this exhibition seeks to continue the exhibition itinerary that, since 2022, has helped to (re)discover Teresa Sousa.

During this visit to Faro, she uses the quadrangular space surrounding the TREM – Manuel Baptista gallery, providing a continuum of the evolution of the artist's graphic work, while establishing relationships with works of drawing and painting, placed in a cross-shaped structure (with special significance for a deeply religious artist), which organizes the space into four moments:

• The school phase (1947-1955) where, in personal and aesthetic coexistence with colleagues such as René Bertholo, Gonçalo Duarte, Lourdes Castro, José Escada, (the last two, future founders of the famous KWY Group and with whom he would found the Galeria Pórtico), he was already looking for a modernity in figurative stylization;
• The «Paris Period» (1956), where, with the support of Vieira da Silva, he attended the famous Atelier 17, engraving, guided by Stanley Hayter, whose experimental opening led by this master allowed him to quickly learn technical and aesthetic skills;
• The professional phase (1957-1961), in which he continued experimenting with engraving and with this challenged painting, developing an updated ambiguous semi-figurative and para-abstract aesthetic of complex interweaving of elements;
• And Interruption (1962), which places us in his last phase, between a recent artistic recognition and an exploration that adapted the previous experiments to figurative renewals, in a careful return to the religious theme. But both this recognition and this artistic research were abruptly interrupted.

Promoted by the Faro Municipal Museum (MMF), entry is free and will be open until October 11, from Tuesday to Friday, from 11:30 am to 6:00 pm and on Saturdays, from 10:30 am to 5:00 pm.