Background
Son of Augusto Vieira de Sá Nogueira and Amélia Dantas Pereira, Rolando Sá Nogueira was born in Lisbon on May 19, 1921. He spent the next five years in Angola, where his father's military career was taking place.
n 1942 he entered the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon to study architecture.
Son of Augusto Vieira de Sá Nogueira and Amélia Dantas Pereira, Rolando Sá Nogueira was born in Lisbon on May 19, 1921. He spent the next five years in Angola, where his father's military career was taking place.
Sa returned to Lisbon and joined the Vasco da Gama College as a boarding school. In 1931 he left the school to live with an uncle, being with him until the return of the parents in 1933; his father died two years later. In 1942 he entered the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon to study architecture. In 1946 it gave up that course and inscribed himself in painting. He made friends, among others, with João Abel Manta, Jorge Vieira (sculptor), and José Dias Coelho.
Sá Nogueira's work began in the mid-1940s, in an artistic context where the figuration/abstraction dichotomy was alive, but which was punctuated in its closest circle by surrealism and neorealism Sa presented his work for the first time in collective exhibitions in 1947, in the 2nd General Exhibition of Plastic Arts. In 1960 he made his first solo exhibition. Between 1962 and 1964 he practiced in Birmingham and Slade School, London, as a grant holder of the Gulbenkian Foundation. Moreover, he participated in the initiatives of the Cooperativa de Grabadores Portugueses.
Between 1969 and 1975 he collaborated in the atelier of the architect Francisco da Conceição Silva, making plastic interventions and coordinating the chromatic options of architectural projects. His action as a teacher linked to the teaching of drawing was decisive in the formation of several generations of younger artists. From the 1960s until the end of his life he taught at several institutions, namely the National Society of Fine Arts, the Superior School of Fine Arts of Porto, or the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Lisbon.
With a language in which the influences of Matisse and above all of Modigliani were detected, he portrayed close friends, many of them belonging to the intelligentsia Lisboeta - João Abel Manta (architect), Jorge Vieira (sculptor), Keil do Amaral (architect) among others. The entrance to the studio of Conceição e Silva in 1969 gave him new conditions to work. Without rupture or break, from the 1980s onwards his work evolved, and returned to more traditional pictorial values and to a type of narrative often closer to his 1950’s work.
Sá Nogueira exhibited extensively along the years, both in group and in one person exhibitions; in 1998 he held a large retrospective exhibition at the Chiado Museum, Lisbon. And he was a highly influential drawing teacher – from 1965 onwards he taught at Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon, at the Oporto School of Fine Arts, at the Lisbon Faculty of Architecture, etc., influencing a whole generation of younger Portuguese artists. The artist died on November 18, 2002 in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2004, the Lisbon City Council honored the painter by giving his name to a street in the Ajuda University Campus in Lisbon.
Without entering into rupture with the formal and narrative universe of the previous decades, realizing a synthesis that compatibilized different moments of his career, from the eighties the painting of Sá Nogueira returned to more traditional, but also more sensitive, pictorial values.
In 1956 Sa married Bina Sá Nogueira, with whom he had two daughters: the director and actress Paula Sá Nogueira and the stylist Mariana Sá Nogueira.