Júlio Pomar

Júlio Artur da Silva Pomar, GOL, GCM (10 January 1926 – 22 May 2018[1]) was a Portuguese painter and visual artist.

The same year, he organised his first exhibition with a group of former colleagues of the António Arroio School, which included painters like Fernando de Azevedo and Marcelino Vespeira.

From June to October 1945, he was director of "A Tarde"'s art page, helping to promote the work of painters such as German Expressionist George Grosz, the Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Brazilian Candido Portinari.

Portuguese art historian Rui Mário Gonçalves described it as one of "the most important milestones of Neo-realist painting, with its theme taken from the life of the proletariat, treated with rough material and with a Portinariesque anatomical accentuation of the feet and hands".

This defence of autonomy leads him to remain faithful to the expression of the gesture, to the exploration of the line, to the opening of composition to an informal pictorial language.

Characterised by a type of figuration that crosses the surprise of the process of association of images learned with surrealism and the heritage of abstract expressionism, the painting of Pomar over the last decades results from the intense activity and a permanent desire for thematic diversification.

He published three books of essays on painting, Discours sur la Cécité des Peintres (1985), Da Cegueira dos Pintores (1986), and Então e a Pintura?

The Atelier-Museum has several hundreds of works by the artist, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures, donated by himself to the Júlio Pomar Foundation.