Acrobazia 2 [Stunt 2]

Over more than seven decades, Bertina Lopes developed a distinct multimedia style of painting that sought to reflect, critique and disentangle the myths surrounding her lived social reality. Born in Maputo, Mozambique, to a Portuguese mother and a Mozambican father, she was educated in Portugal before returning to Mozambique in the 1950s, where she worked as a professor of fine art, while also pursuing her own creative pursuits. Now recognised as a key progenitor of African modernism, acknowledgment did not come easy for Lopes. Acrobazia 2 [Stunt 2] represents one of the artist’s signature attempts to capture the animism of experience on the superficially flat surface of the canvas—the material of the everyday comes to life.