Manuel João Vieira. The Purple Island: Landscapes and Notes
20 MAY 2026 - 07 SEP 2026
MAAT Gallery
Curator: João Pinharanda
Born in Lisbon, in 1962, Manuel João Vieira engages in a wide range of artistic and civic activities and is a prominent figure on the music scene and a regular presence in the political one. Yet it is as a painter, his main area of influence, that he is featured here.
Part of a wave of young artists that emerged in the 1980s, Vieira immediately established a distinctive style. A highly prolific painter, his work is underpinned by a clear figurative preference with a narrative bent.
His canvases are filled with figures, symbols and compositional devices that draw on Greco-Roman culture and reference the last few centuries of Western painting history (Mannerism, Baroque and Rococo, Romanticism and Symbolism, Metaphysical painting and Surrealism), culminating in the eclectic approach that the so-called ‘return to painting’ defined as one of the most significant trends of his generation.
Often large in scale, his works are suggestive of stage design and theatre sets, a metaphor for the many roles the artist himself embodies.
