João Abel Manta
João Abel Manta (born 1928 in Lisbon) is a Portuguese architect, painter, illustrator and cartoonist.
João Abel Manta is the son of the painters Abel Manta and Maria Clementina Carneiro de Moura Manta. He is married to Maria Alice Ribeiro Manta, by whom he has a daughter, Isabel. He lives and works in Lisbon.
He graduated in architecture at the Lisbon Higher School of Fine Arts (1951), where he befriended Rolando Sá Nogueira and José Dias Coelho. From the outset he became integrated within the Lisbon intellectual set connected to the left-wing movements that were against the Fascist dictatorship of Salazar and Marcelo Caetano.
He has won several Portuguese and international prizes, among which are the Drawing Prize at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation II Exhibition of Plastic Arts (1961), the Silver Medal at the International Exhibition of Graphic Arts, in Leipzig (1965) and the Stuart-Regisconta Prize in 1988.
He has participated in a great many group exhibitions in Portugal and abroad; he has held many solo exhibitions, among which are: Galeria Interior, Lisbon, 1971; Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, 1976; Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro Museum, Lisbon, 1992; Cascais Cultural Centre, Cascais, 1999; Palácio Galveias, Lisbon, 2009.
He was responsible, along with Alberto Pessoa and Hernâni Gandra, for the project for the apartment blocks in the Avenida Infante Santo, Lisbon, for which he won the Municipal Architecture Prize (1957).
As a visual artist he has devoted himself to painting, ceramics, tapestry, mosaics, illustration, graphic arts and cartoons. He has designed stamps and posters, and illustrated books, among which is "A cartilha do marialva", by José Cardoso Pires. He is the author of the tapestries of the Noble Hall of the head premises of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Of particular note in the context of public art are the pavement in the Restauradores square, Lisbon, and the large tile panel in the Avenida Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (designed in 1970 and applied 1982).
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