ROOTS 2024 > Guest Artist > Eugénia Mussa (Mozambique)
Eugénia Mussa (1978, Maputo, Mozambique) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. She studied drawing and painting at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual in Lisbon (2009) and has a Foundation Course in Fine Arts from City and Islington College in London (2002). Her diasporic background influences her work, but in her paintings she doesn’t directly confront the theme of African identity, but fuses it with memories, images and feelings collected along the way. A mixture of references and stylistic fluctuation characterize his practice.
Rescuing classic oil or gouache painting techniques applied in series on canvas or cardboard, she explores and flexibilizes the boundaries between repetition and variation, geometry and figuration, the real and the imaginary, and reveals images whose dazzling chromaticism triggers nostalgic experiences. In her figurative work, the artist employs a classic oil painting technique with musical randomness, floating freely between styles, genres or pre-established paradigms. A frequent source of inspiration for her paintings is her vast archive of images, made up of memories of mundane everyday life, both domestic and urban, which she finds in books, postcards and amateur videos recorded on Kodachrome film.
Links: instagram
Funding: Direção-Geral das Artes and Lagos Municipality
Support: Museu de Lagos, Município de Caldas da Rainha / Centro de Artes, CAAA – Centro para os Assuntos de Arte e Arquitectura (Guimarães), Messe Militar de Lagos, Teatro Experimental de Lagos
