MEET
Isabel de Sousa
Isabel Teixeira de Sousa (b. 1955, Lubango, Angola) is a renowned Angolan-Portuguese contemporary artist whose career bridges African visual heritage and European conceptual rigor. Her practice spans more than four decades and is rooted in painting, installation, and object-based composition, often combining abstract forms with strong symbolic presence.
Graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, Teixeira de Sousa began her trajectory exhibiting in both post-independence Angola and Portugal, contributing to the visibility of African women artists in Lusophone contexts. She has presented solo exhibitions across Oporto, Lisbon, Funchal, and Oeiras, and participated in important group exhibitions internationally. Her work is featured in public collections (such as Lisbon and Almada city halls, and the Seixal Cultural Forum) and in private collections across Europe and the United States.
Her most recent series explores the relationship between land, memory and femininity, using natural materials, earth pigments, and textural surfaces to evoke ancestral landscapes, ritual gestures, and bodily absence. Her compositions often integrate fabric, paper, and organic matter, forming a visual language of fragmentation and continuity. At the core of her work is the question of identity, displacement, and the spiritual force of nature.
Teixeira de Sousa’s research includes notions of telluric energy, non-linear time, and the feminine archive. In this context, her artworks become silent narratives — meditative, sensorial, and politically resonant. She often blurs the lines between the sacred and the ordinary, creating immersive visual poems that question the boundaries of contemporary painting.
Her presence in key publications like “Guide de l’Art Africain Contemporain”, “Women in Arts” (Arts Council of Great Britain) and “Esperanças Plásticas Portuguesas” attests to her lasting impact on the fields of African contemporary art, Lusophone visual culture, and female-led abstraction.
