JOÃO LOURO
Portugal, 1963
Lives and works in Lisboa. He studied Architecture at the University of Lisbon and Painting at the Ar.Co. art school. His work comprises painting, sculpture, photography and video.
A scion of minimal and conceptual art, he is especially interested in the avant-garde movements of the early 1900s. His work delineates a topography of time, filled with references of a personal, but mostly generational nature. He constantly resorts to language, more precisely the written word, as a source, and focuses on reassessing the image in contemporary culture via a set of representations and symbols from the collective visual universe. Minimalism, conceptualism, pop culture, structuralism and post-structuralism, writers such as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and artists such as Donald Judd or Marcel Duchamp make up the lexicon through which João Louro expresses himself.
He represented Portugal in the 2015 Venice Biennale, with the exhibition I Will Be Your Mirror | Poems and Problems.