[open the box] António Dacosta

In 1940 Dacosta was co-organiser, along with António Pedro and Pamela Boden, of what turned out to be the first surrealist exhibition in Portugal. This exhibition at the Casa Repe coincided with the Exposição do mundo português in Belém, which sang the glories of Portuguese colonialism, yet presented a different aspect of Portuguese culture: a less monumental, more mysterious and darker one. António Dacosta stopped painting when he was living in Paris in 1949, a dense mist hanging over his surrealist work, which was partially lost when a fire burned down his Lisbon studio in 1944.

Bicho no chão, which lies at the centre of this bright and sensitive process, is a unique, almost abstract and fleeting work. The serpent, which is the only motif on the canvas, possesses a mythological connotation close to what can be found in other paintings belonging to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos; yet the light from the floor, the abstraction of the surface of the canvas and the slight replica of the reptile occupying the upper right corner of the painting turn it into a rare and unique image. It is insular, as he would like to hear it said.

Biography
António Dacosta, an unavoidable figure in Portuguese surrealism, was born in 1914, in Angra do Heroísmo, the Azores, and died in 1990 in Paris. In 1935 he left Terceira island and went to Lisbon, where he completed the course in Painting at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa, also participating in the surrealist exhibitions in Lisbon of 1940 and 1949. In 1942 he was awarded the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Prize. In 1947 he received a grant and moved to Paris. In 1949 – and for about thirty years – he abandoned painting and devoted himself to literature and journalism. His work is represented in several private and institutional collections, such as: the Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis (Oporto), Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, (CAM-FCG) (Lisbon), Museu Carlos Machado (Ponta Delgada, Azores), Museu de Angra do Heroísmo and Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado (Lisbon). His works has been shown in several exhibitions, with special note being the retrospective organized by the CAM-FCG in 1988, as well as the anthological exhibition in 2006 at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves.

Bibliography
Dacosta (cat.), Lisboa/Porto, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/ Fundação de Serralves, 1988. Dacosta, Miriam (coord.), António Dacosta, Lisboa, Quetzal Editores/Galeria 111, 1995.