Ângelo César Cardoso De Sousa was born in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in 1938. He approached his artistic evolution not unlike a scientist does an experiment: he sampled, tested, combined materials, studied reactions and ultimately developed what he deemed worthy. Moving to Porto from Portuguese Mozambique in 1955, he enrolled in the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes (1955-1963). Later in life, he would become a professor at the very same institution (now the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto) between 1962 and 2000.
He held his first solo exhibition in 1959 (when he was still a student), at the Galeria Divulgação in Porto. A brilliant pupil, he was very much at the forefront of his generation. Between 1967 and 1968, a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the British Council gave him the opportunity to spend 10 months in London, where he attended courses at the Slade School of Art and Saint Martin’s School of Fine Art. During these formative months, De Sousa experimented with film and video after acquiring a handheld photometer he used to produce a considerable filmic corpus. Upon his return to Porto, he joined the Os Quatro Vintes (‘The Four Twenties’) group alongside Armando Alves, Jorge Pinheiro and José Rodrigues (1968-1972).
De Sousa began by basing his exploration in reality and figuration, before stripping his work down to its most fundamental elements over the course of thousands of drawings. In the artist’s own words, the purpose of this process was to favour ‘simple and common ancestral and everyday forms, such as a tree, a flower, a face, a nose […] through the quick and elementary recording of schematic figures’. De Sousa’s approach of using minimal means to achieve maximum effects having proved successful, he expanded the scale of his work to create monumental sculpture, thus switching proportions and mediums. The 1960s saw the creation of folded iron and steel plate objects, usually painted in primary colours. In the 1970s, this flexibility was carried over into kinetic ribbon-based pieces, which instrumentalised tension, distension and torsion. As the decades progressed, de Sousa increasingly radicalised simplicity in his work.
By adhering to no particular style, technique or trend, De Sousa enjoyed a freedom manifest in all aspects of his practice. Anything and everything could be experimented with through various visual avenues: ‘I have no creed to which I feel obliged to respond,’ stated the artist plainly.
A free and influential figure, De Sousa’s contributions to culture were recognised far and wide. In 1972 he was awarded an Honourable Mention for the Soquil Prize by the Portuguese Section of the International Association of Art Critics. In 1975, he participated in the 13th São Paulo Biennial. In 1978, he took part in the Venice Biennale. In 2008, he represented Portugal, alongside architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, in the 11th Venice International Architecture Exhibition.
Various retrospectives also punctuated his career: in 1993, he exhibited at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art; in 2001, the Sem Prata exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art showed some of his photographic and filmic works for the very first time; in 2003, the Centro de Arte Moderna of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation presented a large selection of his works on paper; and in 2010, Jorge Silva Melo made a film that followed De Sousa in the last period of his life, entitled Ângelo de Sousa – Tudo O Que Sou Capaz.
De Sousa passed away in 2011.
