Acrobazia 2 [Stunt 2]

Over more than seven decades, Bertina Lopes developed a multimedia approach to painting that sought to disentangle the myths surrounding her lived social reality. Born in Maputo, Mozambique, to a Portuguese Father and a Mozambican mother, she was educated in Portugal before returning to Mozambique in the 1950s, where she worked as a professor of fine art, while also pursuing her own creative pursuits. Though she is now recognised as a progenitor of African modernism, acknowledgment did not come easy for Lopes. Acquired in 2022, Acrobazia 2 [Stunt 2] is one of the artist’s signature body paintings, transposing the dynamism of embodied experience onto the flat surface of the canvas. The central figure's body is contorted into near abstraction, while the surrounding composition recalls the artist’s training in European modernist techniques such as collage. Through such bold and expressive compositions, Lopes offers a unique approach to decolonise the tropes of modernism.

^{*Currently exhibited at The Louvre AD}