Julião Sarmento
JULIAO SARMENTO (1948 – 2021)

Photo: pf.Elle.J 

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Juliao Sarmento, yesterday May 4, in Lisbon. Born in 1948, Juliao Sarmento was a major figure of Portuguese art from the 1970s onwards. He was among the first of his generation to achieve wide international recognition, exhibiting in numerous prestigious museums (including the Tate Modern in London, the Centro Contemporáneo de Malaga in Spain, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the Fundaçao Serralves in Porto). Throughout his life, he carved a place for himself among the great thinkers and artists of contemporary art. His work explored the terrain of desire and representation in an approach combining painting, video, sound and visual installations. Exploiting a huge variety of combinations, Sarmento created an oeuvre with recurring motifs: the archetypal woman, modernist architectural images, plant-like lines, references to literature and the cinema. A large part of his work addresses issues of fragmentation, the gap between the real and fictional.
Fluent in French and a lover of French culture and cinema, Juliao Sarmento was widely admired in our country, where his work was the subject of many museum exhibitions, including Pompidou, MAMAC in Nice or most recently the Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris. A passionate artist, Juliao Sarmento radiated with relentless curiosity and fierce energy. Profoundly humane and generous, he we will greatly missed. Our thoughts are with his family.