Manuel Botelho

Manuel Botelho (born 1950, Lisbon) is a Portuguese artist. He lives and works in Estoril, Portugal, and teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon.

Botelho was born in Lisbon, Portugal. He studied architecture at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts from 1968–76, and painting at the Byam Shaw School of Art (1983–85) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1985–87), London. In 2005 he held a retrospective exhibition at the Modern Art Centre, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon.

Botelho's work has always been concerned with the socio-political realm, and his 1969 collages focused on the May 1968 Paris uprisings and the Vietnam War. From 1970 to 1983 he was mainly involved in architecture, with his art practice remaining marginal and intermittent.

After moving to London in 1983 – where he kept a studio until 1996 – his work became more allegorical and more concerned with questions of personal and collective identity, and his interest in the unveiling of the unconscious was closely linked to his fascination for Goya: "His poetics and iconography spring from the adolescent revelation of Goya's Black Paintings [...] at the Prado Museum."

His early 1980s works were often closely linked to his own life, speaking of loss or separation. Simultaneously, he searched for his roots in the past, and he found himself reflecting on how the present seemed haunted by the memories of 41 years of oppression (Salazar and Caetano's dictatorship – 1933–1974): "We sense it is not Botelho' personal nightmare, but a collective one; the subject he is taking on is the ruinous fabric of a whole society." At the Byam Shaw School of Art Botelho "created a new vision of oppression with a cast of archetypal characters, led by the figure of the Priest/Bishop/Dictator", and by the time he arrived at the Slade, he "was discovering a genuine iconography – a world of donkeys and hovels, of peasants working the fields with primitive tools, of crumbling stone – built walls – a pre-industrial past that stands as a metaphor for modern Portugal".

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