Background
Joaquim Rodrigo was born in 1912 on July 7 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Joaquim Rodrigo was born in 1912 on July 7 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Joaquim Rodrigo received his first education in the field of Agronomy, graduating in 1939.
Later, he was fascinated by painting and started to study it himself. Although, in the 50s, Rodrigo attended several artistic courses at the National Society of Fine Arts (SNBA) in Lisbon. During the training, he fell for Modernism.
Joaquim Rodrigo’s career started in 1939 when he began to work in forestry. During this period, he took part in the project on the afforestation of Monsanto Forest Park (Parque Florestal de Monsanto) along with Jorge Gomes de Amorim and a Portuguese architect and photographer Francisco Keil do Amaral.
Rodrigo’s paintings were exhibited for the first time in 1951. This exhibition was followed by São Paulo Biennale IV in 1957 and, a year later, by Brussels World’s Fair. Since then, the artist regularly took part in the exhibitions organized at the National Society of Fine Arts (SNBA) in Lisbon.
The works of this period, influenced by a Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, were full of expressionism and strict geometric forms for example, two-dimensional architecture compositions. Joaquim Rodrigo used multiple lines and light contrasts in his early paintings which might be called as scientific abstraction.
The 60s were marked by the decisive change of Rodrigo’s artworks which became closer to American pop art and a new emerging figuration in Europe. The artist began to attach great importance to the role of colour and to elaborate his own symbolic painting vocabulary based on personal memories transferred into the compositional field. It was so-called ‘gross art’. At the same time, Rodrigo was fascinated by the José Redinha’s book called The Painted Walls of Luanda which pushed the painter to a non-western narrative tradition.
The following decade, Joaquim Rodrigo combined his painting activity with teaching duties. So, from 1977 till 1979, the artist had worked as a professor of painting course in the National Society of Fine Arts.
The first solo-show of Joaquim Rodrigo was organized in 1982 at the National Society of Fine Arts in Lisbon and brought the artist Ministry Of Culture Award For Visual Arts from AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art – International Association of Art Critics). Later, Rodrigo exhibited in Brussels (1986), Philadelphia (1987) and again in São Paulo (1989).