António Costa Pinheiro died at 82 years (1932-2015), on Friday in Munich, victim of health complications caused by pneumonia. The news was confirmed to PUBLIC by Bernardo Pinto de Almeida, one of the artist’s work scholar and painter.
Shy man, little accustomed to the spotlight of consecration, developed relevant part of his journey in Germany, where he earned an important recognition of artists and gallery owners, and was, in the opinion of the historian and art critic, a discrete pioneered many trends of contemporary art.
With other artists, at home and abroad, co-founded in that country KWY the group, marking the first instance of the internationalization of Portuguese art. After a bumpy passage through Lisbon (arrested by the PIDE in Caxias), settled in 1963 in Munich, starting a career divided between Germany and Portugal.
Its proximity to European art world and above all the uniqueness of painting earned him the praise of Portuguese and German critics and recognition of Harold Szeeman and Joseph Beuys. But in the 70s, away it would paint, developing more conceptual practices. The relationship with Portuguese culture, which never disappeared, would manifest itself with another symbolism, the series dedicated to Fernando Pessoa, initiated in 1976, which revisits the poet and writer heteronyms. Will be one of the best known and most discussed works of Costa Pinheiro, but the artist would choose other paths, dedicated to the architectural design and Citymobile public art.
He continued to exhibit in Portugal, but since 1990 lacked a major retrospective that many of their national counterparts had, a situation that Bernardo Pinto de Almeida finds it incomprehensible. “It was one of the greatest artists of the second half of the twentieth century. I do not understand to this day absence of a major exhibition of his works in a large institution in Portugal. “
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