Background
Joao Vieira was born in Vidago, Vila Real, Portugal, on October 4, 1934. Both of his parents worked as teachers.
Kent Institute of Art & Design.
Escola Secundária Artística António Arroio.
IADE - Creative University.
Music School of the National Conservatory.
Academy la Grande Chaumière.
Escola Secundária Artística António Arroio.
Kent Institute of Art & Design.
IADE - Creative University.
Music School of the National Conservatory.
Joao Vieira was born in Vidago, Vila Real, Portugal, on October 4, 1934. Both of his parents worked as teachers.
In 1951 João Vieira joined the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa (Lisbon Higher School of Fine Arts) in Lisbon. He attended the first two years of the course of painting, which he left behind, disillusioned with the teaching practiced there. After a period of stay in his native region, he returned to Lisbon "to develop an intense and original creative activity." Abandoning his studies quite quickly, he established instead the Grupo do Café Gelo (Group of the Ice Café) in 1956 as the avant-gardist counterpart to the academic and politically compromised education he loathed. Vieira then moved to Paris, where he resumed his studies at the Academy la Grande Chaumière.
João Vieira started to exhibit in 1956. He was a co-founder of the the group KWY (1958-1968), assimilating the abstract and gestural languages that consolidated his early interest in Lettriste painting, whilst discovering new process-based practices of the redefinition of the idea of the artistic object itself. The accumulation of diversified visual experiences and his nomadism throughout different European cities originated a very peculiar idiosyncrasy in Mr. Vieira’s oeuvre within the Portuguese context, as could be seen in his first solo exhibition of painting (Galeria Diário de Notícias, 1959) during a brief stay in Lisbon, where the experimentation of writing’s pictorial possibilities was unmistakable from analogous works by Ana Hatherly or António Sena.
Vieira resumed his itinerancy by going back to Paris (1964) and settling in London afterwards, amidst the Portuguese artistic community (Alberto de Lacerda, Paula Rego, Menez, Bartolomeu Cid, Cesariny, Cutileiro). His experimentalism became the dominant note of his work. The immersion in British Pop culture marked João Vieira, mostly due to the advent of happenings, whose fusion of music, theatre, painting, cinema, photography and sculpture, prompted him to break out of the delimited territory of painting and drawing, and commit himself to multidisciplinary and experimentalist creations in the following years. João Vieira used unusual materials such as rigid polyurethane, flexible foams or car paint, producing assemblages, literary illustrations, happenings and performances (“spectacle-actions”, as he called them) that were pioneering in Portugal, and also transposed poems and letters into thickly-coloured canvases or into three-dimensional objects, giving rise to large-scale environments.
The visual paths of exploring spatial surroundings and the presence of bodies led him to devote himself mainly to theatre between the 1960s and 1970s. When he returned to Portugal, in 1967, he started working almost exclusively in set design, contracted by the TV network RTP (1968-1972) and for occasional theatre plays (Pinter, Beckett, Brecht, Marivaux, Bulgakov). João Vieira was also a stage director. The performative act, characteristic of the redefinition of artistic objects in the 1970s, was imported and assumed by João Vieira when he created some of the first happenings and performances (dubbed by him as "spectacle-actions") in Portugal, among others in the Judite Cruz Gallery (1970), ending with the destruction of all works exhibited or about the human body, as in mamograms (1981-2000), inspired by Venus de Milo’s breasts, or retrieving the typical costumes of Trás-os-Montes, in Caretos (1984), or creating several large-scale three-dimensional letters, always calling for the intertextuality of works and the interference of public. These were some of the experimental coordinates that, between the 1970s and early 1980s, took his installations and videos to prominence at the main avant-garde events back then.
João Vieira departed for London again in 1973, working and researching on theatre and visual arts, and then returned to Portugal the following year for good, being contracted as designer in a factory of polyurethane foams, Flexipol, until 1975. Established in Lisbon, after the 25th April Revolution in 1974, he devoted himself to teaching painting and to cultural development, as employee of the State Secretary of Culture (1975-1981) in the area of Cultural Action, coordinating the defunct National Gallery of Modern Art in Belém, and as advisor to the State Secretary of Culture. Mr. Vieira was also professor of painting at the Escola Secundária Artística António Arroio (1962-1964), at the Maidstone College of Art in London (present-day Kent Institute of Art & Design) (1965), at the IADE (1971-1972) and the National Society of the Fine Arts (from 1980 onwards) in Lisbon, and taught set design at the National Conservatory in Lisbon (1978-1979).
When approaching the 1990s, João Vieira revisited Portuguese art history. Without a particular activity in exhibitions, Vieira’s public art interventions were manifold, as in the decoration of the Eduardo Martins Building in Lisbon (1993), or the creation of azulejo panels for the metro station of Terreiro de Paço, in Lisbon, and Deák Tér in Budapest (1996), rendering Portuguese and Hungarian poems. João Vieira represented Portugal at the 39th Venice Biennale (1980) and participated at SACOM 2 and 3 (1979 and 1980) at the Museo Vostell Malpartida, in Cáceres.
João Vieira was a highly appreciated painter and a recipient of a number of awards. For instance, he received the Prémio do Círculo de Teatro Latino de Barcelona (Award of the Latin Theatre Circle of Barcelona) in 1968. He earned an Honorable Mention in the SOQUIL Award in 1970. The following year Mr. Vieira was also awarded the National Prize for Theatre (1971), and in 2009 he was posthumously distinguished with the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Award (2009).
O Teatro
A Grande
Four Seasons
Viúva de Man Ray, Negra
O Gato
Uma rosa é
Pianel do Infante
Cortina de Espuma
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La chair este triste
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Careto com Burro
Anagrama
Metamorfose
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Restauro e Repinte
Anagrama - Elo, Anagrama link
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Cesário Verde
Link (Assemblage)
Elo
Book of Cesário Verde
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Campo
