Graça Morais

The work and life of Graça Morais are steeped in the atmosphere and rural mythology of Trás-os-Montes, in the far northeast of Portugal. She splits her time between her studios in Lisbon and Vieiro-Freixiel, the village in northern Portugal where she was born in 1948. Vieiro-Freixiel is also home to people whose stories are interwoven with the characters, most of them female, that populate her drawings and paintings, in turn becoming muddled up with the artist herself: “I’m always telling my own story,” she says.

“I can get at things faster by drawing,” she says, and she does indeed draw briskly, on large canvases and in her personal everyday notebooks, weaving mythical, tragic choreographies that layer the secrets of working women, the restless motion of animals, the astounding, transformative cycles of nature and minds that contain entire villages. Yet she also portrays “a world transfigured” by barbarity, the drama of war and the exodus of refugees underlining “the courage of people who venture into hell in a quest to rescue others”.