Inácio Matsinhe, 1945
Biography

Inácio Matsinhe was born in 1945 and emerged as part of a generation of Mozambican artists connected to Maputo's Núcleo de Arte, the artists' association that shaped much of the country's modern visual culture in the decades around independence.

Matsinhe's paintings are known for a distinctive treatment of the human face, dividing the lips of his figures into four parts — a formal device the artist has linked to the territories and peoples of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea shaped by a shared colonial history.

He worked and exhibited alongside contemporaries such as Malangatana Ngwenya and Alberto Chissano, contributing to a Mozambican modernist movement that used painting and sculpture to process both a shared cultural inheritance and the political upheavals of the twentieth century.