Nelo Teixeira Angola, 1974

Nelo Teixeira is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, collage, assemblage, sculpture, and installation.His work engages in a profound dialogue with Art Brut, Arte Povera, and the Fluxus movement, incorporating found materials and discarded objects to construct visual narratives that oscillate between the poetic and the political.

Profoundly influenced by the urban and social realities of Luanda, Teixeira transforms fragments of daily life—metal cans, wooden crates, plastics, fabrics, and urban debris—into compositions that evoke memory, precarity, and resilience. His approach integrates graphic and linguistic elements, where words and inscriptions emerge as visual symbols and performative gestures, inscribing new layers of meaning onto the materials he reclaims.

His experience in theatrical and television set design manifests in the installation-based dimension of his work, where precarious architectural structures and modular forms evoke informal housing spaces and the fragmentation of the social fabric. His visual universe—populated by stylized, typified human figures—bears affinities with the expressive force of Jean Dubuffet, Karel Appel, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, establishing a visceral link between materiality and human representation.

In 2015, Nelo Teixeira represented Angola at the Venice Biennale, participating in the pavilion "On Ways of Travelling", alongside António Ole, Binelde Hyrcan, Délio Jasse, and Francisco Vidal. There, he presented a monumental installation of anthropomorphic sculptures, composed of wood, metal, and repurposed materials. Since then, he has exhibited across multiple geographies, consolidating a practice that traverses tradition and contemporaneity, art and activism.

Teixeira currently lives and works between Angola and Portugal, continuing to develop a body of work that reflects on territory, identity, and social transformation, employing art as a tool of resistance and collective reinvention.