Manuela Pimentel Portuguese, b. 1979

Overview
Manuela Pimentel ingeniously fuses together references to the traditional handicraft art of painted mural tiles with the aesthetics of street billboards and their cumulative layers of ripped and lacerated advertising posters. Bearing in mind post-war artists of the New Realism movement such as Mimmo Rotella, Raymond Hains or Jacques Villeglé, Pimentel incorporates fragments of street posters she takes off herself or uses them as supports for her painted interventions. Using acrylic colours, the artist accurately reproduces traditional figures and scenes taken from the visual culture of the Portuguese azulejos. By integrating the tiles’ conventional chromaticism, iconography and naif-style rendering into specific wall-mounted art works and by merging all of it with torn street posters, adding resins, rough mortar and neon lights, the artist reconfigures the place of the azulejo as a popular and decorative expression that used to belong to local collective memory to inscribe it in the space of global artistic creation.
 
She was distinguished with the ESAP award from the Higher Course in Visual Arts (2004), and received the First Prize in the Servartes Painting Award (Porto, Portugal, 2007). Recently, her work was distinguished with the Public Vote Award of the Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize (September 2022). Recent projects also include the illustration of the issue that the Colóquio Letras magazine, from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, dedicates to Manuel Alegre in September (2022). In 2024, the National Tile Museum will dedicates to her a solo exhibition.
 
 
Works
Exhibitions
Art Fairs
Press
Video
Publications
Events