Discover 6 artists from Portugal

When I - Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso - stroll through the narrow streets of Lisbon today, I can feel the colours of the Atlantic and the light of the southern sun dancing on my sketchpad. For me, Portuguese art is the eternal dialogue between longing and departure, between melancholy and the joy of discovery. Our painting breathes saudade, that untranslatable feeling of bittersweet melancholy that resonates in every brushstroke. But it is also characterised by the curiosity that once drove our seafarers out into the world - and led the artists to interweave foreign influences with native motifs.



A single watercolour can tell the whole story of a country: The blue azulejos reflected in the windows, the golden light dancing on the white houses and the shadows of the fig trees that lie across the paper like memories. In the works of José Malhoa, for example, the chronicler of everyday life in Portugal, the colours of folk festivals and the quiet life of the villages light up. His oil paintings are like windows into a world in which simple life becomes poetry. But modernity has also left its mark: In my own experiments with colour and form, in the bold lines of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, who translates the labyrinth of the city into abstract compositions, or in the expressive portraits of Paula Rego, who dissects the Portuguese soul with her etchings and pastels - time and again we encounter the interplay between tradition and innovation.



Sometimes a single detail is enough to capture the unique character of Portuguese art: the shadow of a fishing boat stretching into infinity in a photograph by Helena Almeida; the soft shimmering of light on an old wall, captured in a gouache by Júlio Pomar. Portuguese art is never loud, never intrusive - it whispers, it entices, it tells stories between the lines. And it is deeply influenced by the landscape, by the sea, by the wind that ruffles the colours on the paper. Anyone who engages with this art discovers not just a country, but a whole world of light, colour and emotion - a world that unfolds anew in every art print, in every drawing, in every picture.