Portuguese painter and teacher passes away Eurico Gonçalves
The painter and teacher Eurico Gonçalves, a pioneer in artistic education in Portugal, died during the early hours of Sunday, aged 90, the family said. One of the names of Portuguese surrealism, a pioneer in artistic education in Portugal, author of a personal aesthetic baptized as Dadá-Zen, he had more than 70 years of career.
Eurico Gonçalves was born in 1932 in Abragão (Penafiel). Recognized specialist in the knowledge of the plastic expression of the child, he named the Escola Básica Eurico Gonçalves, at Lumiar, in Lisbon. He received a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris and received the Almada Negreiros Prize in 1998. In 2005 he was awarded the Grand Prize of the XIII International Biennial of Arts of Vila Nova de Cerveira, an event in which he had participated in all editions until then and whose recognition considered, with humor and pragmatism, “late” but “special”. He was 73 years old at the time and was fluent in the aesthetic expression that he had made his own — “Dada-Zen was the designation created by Eurico to relate dada vitalism and the Zen philosophical attitude. Both propose an unprejudiced and spontaneous art, open to the intervention of chance and to the revelation of the immediate data of the unconscious”, writes Dalila d'Alte Rodrigues in her doctoral thesis The work ofEurico Gonçalves from the perspective of Portuguese and international surrealism. Cerveira's grand prize was a kind of corollary of his various distinctions: between 1966 and 67 he was a scholarship holder at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, where he worked with the French painter Jean Degottex and attended the Sorbonne University, where he had Jean Francastel and René as masters. Huyghe, reads a resume he sent to newsrooms. In 1998 he received the Almada Negreiros Painting Prize.
As a plastic artist, he had dozens of individual exhibitions, including those held at Galeria Presença, in Porto (1996), or the anthological I am alive and write Sol, 1949-2006 (2007) or Dada-Zen/Pintura-Escrita ( 2010), as well as Eurico Gonçalves, Zen-inspired Gesture, Informal and/or Calligraphic Painting (2018). Among the group exhibitions, he curated O Erotismo na Arte Moderna Portuguesa at the invitation of Cruzeiro Seixas, was part of the Portuguese representation at the XVII Bienal Internacional de S. Paulo (1983) or the First Exhibition of Surrealism or Not, curated by Mário Cesariny It is Cruzeiro Seixas. In 1972, he prefaced the important exhibition by Henri Michaux, at Galeria S. Mamede in Lisbon.
In addition to having done art criticism for several Portuguese newspapers and magazines, he also authored the books A Pintura das Crianças and Nós – Parents, Teachers and Educators (Porto Editora, 1976), A Arte Descobre a Criança (Raiz Editora, 1991), The Child Discovers Art (Raiz Editora, 1991/93), Narratives of Dreams, Poems and Automatic Texts 1950/51 (Edições Prates, 1995), Dádá-Zen/Pintura-Escrita (Edições Quasi, 2005), and participated with O Eroticism in Modern Portuguese Art in the work Sexology in Portugal (Texto Editora, 1987).
He was a specialist in knowing the plastic expression of children, describes Dalila Rodrigues, who recalls that the artist named the Escola Básica Eurico Gonçalves, in Lisbon.Eurico Gonçalves became known for being a painter, teacher, art critic and pioneer in the field of artistic education in Portugal. His work is represented in the collections of some of the most important Portuguese art institutions — at the Modern Art Center of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, at the Amadeo de Souza Cardoso Museum, at Culturgest, at the Chiado Museum, at the Center for Surrealism Studies - Fundação Cupertino de Miranda, among other institutions.