Julião Manuel Tavares Sena Sarmento was born in Lisbon in 1948. He attended the architecture course at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts (1967-1974). During this period, the artist largely shaped his aesthetic sensibilities by exploring Anglo-Saxon influences. Pop art, minimalism and their subsequent conceptual evolutions would become his languages of choice.
As such, Sarmento blended techniques and creative media – film, painting, collage, photo montage and text work – to capture the full potential of contemporary artistic discourse. Not all these means were manufactured by the artist himself. Be it image or text, Sarmento liked to ‘quote’ pre-existing artworks, extract them from their temporality and create novel relationships between them to subvert their meaning. As the artist explained, rather poetically: ‘What I do today is part of what I did yesterday, and what I did twenty years ago, and what I will do tomorrow’.
In the 1980s, like many of his contemporaries, Sarmento embraced a return to painting. Under his brush, the practice took on a renewed expressive and figurative character. The human body, which had reappeared as a subject, would not overstay its welcome, however. Indeed, towards the end of the decade, and particularly in the 1990s, the Portuguese painter, inspired by travels and international references, would embark on a series entitled White Paintings. In these works, the peak of Sarmento’s international appeal, the figure is vaporous, progressively vanishing among white line work set against a white background.
The artist’s first solo exhibition was an intimate affair held in the basement of the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes in 1976. Early French and American influences were explicit and unique within the relatively sheltered context of Portuguese painting. Since then, Sarmento has embodied Portuguese contemporary art, showcasing it on an international scale. His numerous retrospective shows are testament to his brilliance: Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (1991); Reina Sofía Museum of Art, Madrid (1992); Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (1993, 2000). In 2011, the Tate Modern in London dedicated an Artist Room to his works. In 2012-2013, the Serralves Museum, Porto, organised Noites Brancas, the most complete retrospective of his work to date (it earned Sarmento the International Association of Art Critics Award in 2014). The Belém Cultural Centre and Reina Sofía Museum of Art in Madrid have both scheduled retrospectives.
Sarmento passed away in 2021.
