Bertina Lopes

Bertina Lopes (July 11, 1924 – February 10, 2012) was a Mozambican-born, Italian painter and sculptor. Lopes' work displays a deep African sensibility with saturated colours and bold compositions of mask-like figures and geometric forms. She has been acknowledged for highlighting 'the social criticism and nationalistic fervour that influenced other Mozambican artists of her time'. Lopes taught Artistic Drawing at General Machado Girls’ Technical School for nine years. During this period of her life, cultural nationalism became a large influence for both her artwork and personal ideology.

In 1956, Lopes painted a mural called "Pavilhão da Evocação Histórica" which was inaugurated on the occasion of an official visit to Mozambique of Francisco Higino Craveiro Lopes, President of the Portuguese Republic at the time when António de Oliveira Salazar was Presidente do Conselho (the official designation of the Portuguese Prime Minister). Three years later, Bertina Lopes was nominated president of the “Núcleo de Arte” of Maputo and Vice President of “Direcção” of “Núcleo de Arte”.

Death She died in Rome in 2012 at the age of 86.

Work Lopes' work was influenced by multiple sources, including Mozambican art and Portuguese modernism. Between 1946 and 1956, she embraced the art of Western painters and South American graffiti artists.

In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Her work Sto Sognando? La Città è questa? is in the collection of the National Museum of African Art, in Washington, D.C.