Cruz-Filipe

Organised with the artist, this exhibition presents 57 paintings by Cruz-Filipe that chart the evolution of his work from the 1970s to his latest canvas painted in 2020. Despite the overall retrospective approach, ten previously unseen paintings are shown from 2015 onward that are a continuation of the second phase in his painting dedicated to landscapes.

An engineer by training and profession, Cruz-Filipe has created a parallel body of visual work in which he combined painting and photography in a very particular manner. His work gained prominence in the late 1960s, more specifically from 1969 onward, when, for the first time, he exhibited a series of paintings executed on photosensitive canvases, a technique which he helped to pioneer in Portugal.

Heir to the pop art style, both in the use and collage of fragments of appropriated images and, initially, in the characteristics of these images themselves, his work developed through a selective gaze – a way of seeing – at the history of western painting, with particular focus on 16th and 17th Italian and Flemish painting.