Victor Milheirão was born in Ovar, but grew up in Lisbon. At the age of 24, he studied painting and ended up graduating as one of the top students at the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon in 1967. He dedicated his life to the visual arts and graphic restoration. He was the last to leave the graphic restoration workshop at the Gulbenkian Foundation, where he worked for 34 years.
Throughout his artistic career, he developed a particular predilection for representing the bicorne hat, a figure that is eternally present in his works, thus becoming a fundamental element in his compositions. He worked with various materials such as spray paint, Indian ink, watercolor, pastel, and acrylics. He always felt a strong affinity and inspiration from Picasso’s work, which is evident in his own brushstrokes. The titles of his works also reflect the influence of his readings, the semantics of Aquilino Ribeiro, and Camilo Castelo Branco. “I really like the expressions they use, I like to recover these ruins of speech.”
He began his career at the Gulbenkian Museum as a restoration technician and eventually became the head of the graphic document restoration department, where he worked on recovering graphic pieces such as Japanese and European prints, Islamic books, Western parchment books, and Japanese prints. Despite his work at the museum, he never stopped painting, drawing, and attending exhibitions.
In 1980, he enrolled in the museum curator course at the National Museum of Ancient Art. He taught restoration at the Ipiranga Museum in São Paulo for a month. He traveled to Japan and Canada to bring and retrieve paintings from museums. He wrote about Amadeo Sousa Cardoso’s drawing technique, but the publication was never released by the Gulbenkian Foundation.
He created “Laparotos,” a comic strip featuring mischievous bunnies, for the magazine Fungagá da Bicharada, directed by Júlio Isidro. He published cartoons in Parada da Paródia and Diário de Lisboa. In the 1990s, he won a prize for free humor at the National Caricature Salon of Oeiras with a drawing of Van Gogh painting the famous bedroom.
He taught drawing and painting at the Antonio Arroio School of Decorative Arts for two years. Currently, in the city center, at Praça da República
