Antonio Areal

Background

Antonio Areal was born in 1934 in Porto, Portugal.

Education

It is known that António Areal was mostly self-taught.

Career

A self-taught artist, António Areal was particularly influenced by literature and philosophy in the development of his training. António Areal began his career in the 1950s, developing his work in the fields of drawing, painting, and sculpture, in a practice based on heterogeneous aesthetic references. Between 1953 and 1958 he uses the light and darkness and the lack of definition of the objects and the landscape, in dreamlike and visionary drawings with the evident influence of surrealism, which had begun to impose itself in Portugal in the second half of the 1940s, influencing several emerging artists of the following decade. He began his exhibition career in 1954 and in 1956 held his first solo exhibition. In the following year, he was awarded the Drawing Prize at the I Exhibition of Plastic Arts of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, highlighting in the works of this time the series of drawings of visionist matrix and surrealist influence.

In 1960 António received a scholarship, leaving the following year for São Paulo, where he remained until 1962. In later works, from the 1961 - 1963 phase, António Areal developed informalist painting practices with a gestural matrix. After 1964, the artist produced neofigurative pictorial compositions, assemblage, and collage with pictorial inscriptions of stylized geometric shapes. António Areal presented the first series of the wooden objects, boxes with assemblages and cubes painted and drawn in June 1964 in the Galeria Divulgação, attributing the reason for his turning from painting to sculpture on the latter's side, by absorbing pictorial techniques and procedures, drawing linearity and three-dimensionality. In that exhibition was published a leaf with a text of his, entitled "Who is to be contemporary", where he reacted critically to the conservatism and provincialism of the Portuguese artistic panorama. The combination of artistic activity with an intervention writing was, nonetheless, another strong mark of his career.

Antonio's career was then given a major boost: he received the Painting Prize from the Casa da Imprensa in 1965 and the Drawing Prize at the 3rd National Salon of Modern Art in 1968 and was selected to represent Portugal at the IX São Paulo Biennial in 1968. At the beginning of the 1970s, his work became more formal and narrative, accompanying the development of his reflection on the status of art, of the artist and of criticism, which he dealt with. The artist died in 1978 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Achievements

• António Areal distinguishes himself in the Portuguese art scene of the second half of the twentieth century as a leading figure in the transition from Surrealism to Action painting. He was highly famous for his paintings "Homenagem a Fernão Mendes Pinto", "Opus II nº 40", "Figura", and "Mês de Marte."

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Opus II nº 40

  • 4 Series of 67

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • A História Dramática de um Ovo - Objecto

  • Mês de Marte

  • The Dramatic History of an Egg

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Homenagem a Fernão Mendes Pinto

  • Untitled

  • O Fantasma de Avignon - 1

  • Untitled

  • Figura

  • Untitled

  • Série Coleccionador

  • Cena incompreensível mas talvez decisiva na cadeira um desconhecido olha fixamente para o público

  • From The Dramatic History of an Egg

  • O Colecionador de Belas-Artes - O Colecionador do 1º dia

  • paisagem com a filha da francesa, nesse dia

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

Views

Antonio Areal adhered to the artistic traditions of Art Informel and Pop Art.

Connections

António Areal is the father of four daughters, one of them is the painter Sofia Areal.

Daughter:

Sofia Areal