António Dacosta (3 November 1914 - 2 December 1990) was a Portuguese painter, poet and art critic and a pioneer of the surrealist movement in Portugal.
Strongly opposed to the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal and horrified by the violence of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Nationalist victory, his painting took a menacing and surrealistic turn.
He displayed his first paintings at Casa Repe in 1940 along with fellow painter António Pedro and English sculptor, Pamela Boden.
He also showed at the annual national Salon of Modern Art where he won the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Prize in 1942.
In 1969 Dacosta attended a retrospective of his works from 1939 to 1948 at the Galeria Buchholz in Lisbon and in 1978 his paintings were included in Portuguese Art since 1910 at the Royal Academy of London, a show that he visited with his friend and fellow-artist, Júlio Pomar.
In 1971 he moved with his wife, Miriam Rewald, the gallerist, and two young children to Janville, a small town south of Paris, where he started making little objects, ‘things,’ as he liked to call them.
However, due to increasing bad health, painting became difficult and the commission was completed under the auspices of his friend and fellow artist Pedro Morais and inaugurated in 1998.
A catalogue raisonné was prepared by Fernando Rosas Dias, of the School of Fine Arts, Lisbon, and was published in 2012 with reproductions of his entire oeuvre.