Maria Menezes

A self-taught artist, Maria Menezes was born in Viseu in 1974. By chance of fate, but also for family and professional reasons, she lived, between 2010 and 2020, in London, São Paulo and Lisbon. With a large family to care for, she gave up her personal assertion throughout her life, choosing to ensure the stability of the family structure. Only very recently, after seeing all four of her children follow their own paths, did she decide to give free rein to her individual expression.
Attending a ceramics workshop in São Paulo, Brazil, just to fill her free time, had revealed a creative streak in her that she didn’t know existed within herself.

Maria kept this flame alive after returning to Portugal, starting to frequent several ceramic sculpture workshops, first in Lisbon and more recently in Porto. Here, albeit in a detached manner, she began an exploratory process of the plastic possibilities of the material, deviating from conventional formats.

The artworks featured in the exhibition “Arrythmia” [arrhythmia in medieval Latin] are the result of this exploration driven by intuition, something that has always been present in the arrhythmic, successively changing trajectory of tension and containment in the artist’s life.