Bertina Lopes
Bertina Lopes, an internationally renowned artist, was born in Maputo in 1924. She attended school in Maputo and completed secondary school in Lisbon where she began to study painting and drawing with Lino António and Celestino Alves.
The cultural and artistic atmosphere in Portugal at that time was suffocated by the dictatorial regime’s censorship, especially regarding the creation of what was defined as “black art”.
In 1961, for political reasons and due to strong oppression by colonialism, Lopes left Mozambique for Portugal. In Lisbon she met the director of Galeria III, through whom she continued to investigate the stylistic and conceptual novelties of avant-garde painting, popularizing it to many artists and intellectuals who had been in Portugal. In 1993, in Lisbon, Bertina Lopes was nominated “Comendadora das Artes” by the President of Portugal, Mário Soares. Later that year, she became Cultural Advisor of the Embassy of Mozambique in Italy.