Bertina Lopes
Biography

Bertina Lopes was born on 11 July 1924 in Lourenço Marques — present-day Maputo, Mozambique — to a Portuguese father and a Mozambican mother from a locally prominent family. She studied painting, drawing and sculpture in Lisbon under Lino António and Celestino Alves, where she moved in the same circles as Portuguese modernists Júlio Pomar and Carlos Botelho.

She returned to Maputo in 1953 and spent nearly a decade teaching art, including artistic drawing at the General Machado Girls’ Technical School, and was named president of Maputo’s Núcleo de Arte in 1959. As a teacher in these years she influenced a generation of Mozambican artists, among them a young, self-taught Valente Malangatana Ngwenya.

Political circumstances — her first husband, the poet Virgílio de Lemos, was arrested for anti-colonial activity — forced her from Mozambique in the early 1960s, and by the mid-1960s she had settled permanently in Rome, where she became an Italian citizen in 1965 and befriended figures of the Italian art world including the sculptor Marino Marini.

Working across painting and sculpture, Lopes developed a distinctive Abstract Expressionist idiom — saturated colour and bold, mask-like figures and geometric forms rooted in Mozambican visual tradition, fused with Portuguese modernism and, from the 1970s, an increasingly political, gesturally abstract language shaped by the independence struggle and the poetry of José Craveirinha and Noémia de Sousa. Her Totem series (1979–1983) remains among her best-known bodies of work.

She is regarded as one of the most important woman artists to have emerged from Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, and among the first African women to move fluidly between African and European fine-art traditions. Her work was included in the landmark 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou, and more recently in Action, Gesture, Paint at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023), the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and the 36th São Paulo Biennial (2025–2026).

[read more about Contemporary Art in Mozambique here]

African Contemporary does not currently have original works by Bertina Lopes available.