Clara Menéres

Within the genealogy of pop art, the provocative initial works of Clara Menéres gave rise to some controversy in the artistic scene of a country still deeply mired in dictatorship. In spectacular figurations of hyper-realistic detail, scale and intense chromaticism, these works explicitly referred to the concealment of child prostitution, to the constant arrival of dead young soldiers from the trenches of the Colonial War, and to the subordination of the sexuality and living conditions of women in a country ruled under a dominant machismo culture. 

Her approach of ritualisation of the sacred intensified in 1980 when a revelation of a mystical nature led the artist to embark on a less provocative body of work focused on formal and material essentialism. In 1987 she produced a series of works in stone and light. Deeply sensory in nature, these works explore ideas of transcendence and ecstasy, bringing together the crude and unpolished nature of marble stone with the luminous and tubular phosphorescence of neon lighting.