Born in Porto in 1937, the artist graduated in Painting from ESBAP in 1963, where he later became a professor. As a student, he received several awards, including the José da Costa Meireles and Rodrigo Soares Prizes, as well as the Três Artes and Rotary Club do Porto awards. He began exhibiting collectively in the 1950s and held his first solo exhibition in the year he graduated. He was a founding member of the Árvore Cooperative and cofounder of the arts and literature magazine “Paisagem”. He received two grants from F.C.G., one in 1966 for study visits to Europe and another in 1978 to research “Realism in the 20th century”.
In the 1960s, his work reached abstraction, focusing on material and gestural investigation, which he would abandon in the following decade to embrace meticulous realism, depicting everyday objects. From the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, his paintings witnessed a return to almost expressionist brushstrokes, inaugurating a new cycle in the artist’s production.
