António Dacosta

About

António Dacosta (1914-1990) was a Portuguese painter, poet, and art critic renowned as a pioneer of the surrealist movement in Portugal. Born in the Azores, he studied at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts and debuted in 1940 with exhibitions alongside António Pedro, influenced by the Spanish Civil War and opposition to the Salazar dictatorship, which infused his work with menacing surrealism. He won the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Prize in 1942 and held his first surrealist show that year, though many works were lost in a 1944 studio fire. Throughout the 1940s, he contributed art criticism to newspapers and illustrated books.

Early surrealism evolving to figurative mystical style with pagan-religious Azores imagery