Almada Negreiros' work on display at Soares dos Reis Museum

The National Museum Soares dos Reis, jointly with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, hosts the exhibition "José de Almada Negreiros: desenho em movimento". The exhibit opens 30 November and it will be on show till 18 March 2018.

The exhibit is curated by Mariana Pinto dos Santos and gathers 90 drawings by Almada Negreiros.

Almada Negreiros was a Portuguese artist, born in the former Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe. He always considered himself a futurist artist, inspired by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and other modern artists.

His work as a visual artist extended to tapestry, printmaking, theatre and ballet scenography. The Portuguese painter was also a poet and a significant part of his artistic production was literary. Almada Negreiros wrote novels, poems, playwrights, essays and manifests.

The writer's work is rich in comic details and expresses a sense of the absurd and non-sense that can be related to earlier writers like Eugène Ionesco or Arthur Adamov.

His artistic production was prolific and Negreiros is viewed as the key Portuguese figure in modern art, influenced by Cubism and, mainly, by Futurism.

The exhibit at the National Museum Soares dos Reis will also release some unpublished works by the author.

Almada Negreiros considered that all forms of art are intimately linked. As such, the combination of cinema and drawing is evident in such works as "La Tragedia de Doña Ajada" (1929) and the animated movie "O Naufrágio da Ínsua" (1934). These works were specifically designed for cinema screening.

"José de Almada Negreiros: desenho em movimento" opens on 30 November and closes on 18 March 2018.