Francisco Laranjo
Henrique Marques and Rui Dinis
Graça Morais
Artist
Graça Morais was born in Vieiro, Trás-os-Montes, but soon started seeing other worlds when she left the village to accompany her mother to Africa. Art came naturally in her life. She always liked to draw, but it was perhaps that set of watercolours that her father gave her during her childhood that provided the trigger for her ‘destiny’. She graduated in Painting from the School of Fine Arts of Oporto and exhibited for the first time in Guimarães, in the Alberto Sampaio Museum, in 1974, the same year in which her daughter Joana was born. Graça Morais lives between Lisbon, Trás-os-Montes and many other places in the world and is the Trás-os-Montes artist to enjoy the most exposure, nationally and internationally. She is a member of the National Academy of Fine Arts and various associations, confraternities and cultural foundations. She was awarded the rank of Grand Officer of the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator, by President Jorge Sampaio. She was awarded the Casino da Póvoa Arts Prize in 2011 and the National Fine Arts Academy Painting Prize in 2013. Plast&Cine honoured her in 2015 as Artist of the Year. La Violence et la Grâce was one of her latest exhibitions at the Calouste Gulbenkian Centre, in Paris. Ten years after the opening of the Graça Morais Contemporary Art Centre, in Bragança, the artist wanted to mark the date in a special way with the exhibition Humanidade.
How did your passion for art come about?
It came out simply and naturally during my childhood when, at the age of nine, my father gave me a box of watercolours. Later, at the age of eighteen, I started studying painting at the School of Fine Arts in Oporto and decided that art would be my choice in life.
Who are the women who inhabit your pictures?
They are the women who inhabit a geographic territory and of affections whose life stories intersects with my own.
What inspires Graça Morais?
I don’t know what inspiration means. I know about the urge to draw and to paint and to look at the world in depth and, as a result of daily work, finally manage, in the most secret, intimate and sacred place of my studio, to create works that amaze me.
«This exhibition [«Humandidade»] brings together eighty works... resulting from a reflection on a social reality full of despair and major questions about humanity»
Is the Graça Morais Contemporary Art Centre in Bragança a way of returning to your homeland?
The CACGM in Bragança was the result of the will of a local authority and its major, Jorge Nunes, who decided in the Municipal Assembly and unanimously to assign my name to it, honouring me greatly. In ten years, I have held 22 solo exhibitions about my work, showing the different phases of my work over more than forty years.
You are marking the ten years of the Graça Morais Contemporary Art Centre with an unseen exhibition. What view is this of «Humanity»?
This exhibition brings together eighty works on paper, mostly graphite, charcoal drawings and painting resulting from a reflection on a social reality full of despair and major questions about humanity.
