Born in Mozambique, Bertina Lopes (1924-2012) was a pioneer of African modernism, ushering in a mélange of forms that reflected her political reality as a Black woman amid war and exile. Her oeuvre is marked by a subversion of style and genre, as she plays with principles of surrealism, cubism, abstraction, and gestural painting, ultimately marked by a stylistic freedom that evades definition. Lopes was deeply tied to political movements in Mozambique, and her early paintings reflect a melancholic surrealism rooted in her yearning for independence. These early works are marked by a gestural figuration evocative of the somber daily life of Mozambiquans under colonization.

The abstraction of the figure featured early in her practice. The civil war that followed the 1975 Mozambican independence only strengthened Lopes’s references to modernist abstraction, as her compositions took on dynamic perspectives and more symbolism. Exiled in Rome for most of her life, Lopes maintained a commitment to exploring Mozambican identity under restricted, political rules.

This engagement with African cultural symbolism and identity, despite her physical distance from the continent, can be seen, for example, in the way totems from African communities appear in her work – placing the contribution of her continent of origin at the center of a body of work marked by its avant-garde character.

Lopes was always at the forefront of modernist movements. She engaged with elements of impressionism and cubism, styles once thought to be European movements. By deconstructing, blurring, abstracting, and smudging the archetypes of African symbolism, Lopes’s work remains enigmatic, defying the neat categorizations of formalism, as can be seen in the paintings on view at this 36th Bienal de São Paulo.

This is not the first time Bertina Lopes has been invited to participate in the Bienal. She was previously included in the 7th edition, in 1963, but firmly refused to participate under the national representation of Portugal, the colonizing country. This commitment will be on view in her current participation in the 36th Bienal, the artist’s largest exhibition in Brazil.