EUGÉNIA MUSSA

Born in Maputo, Mozambique, 1978. Lives and works in Lisbon.

Eugénia Mussa (1978, Maputo, Mozambique), lived in her home city until she was five years old, between the Matola and Polana neighbourhoods, in the middle of the Mozabican civil war. In 1983, she came with her family to Portugal. She studied drawing and painting at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (2009) and has a Foundation Course in Fine Arts from City and Islington College (2002). She was selected to Anticiparte, New Talents Award (2009) and received an honorable mention at 25th Anniversary of the Mozambique Bank (2010). In Portugal she has exhibited her work at Galeria Quadrum (2017), at AnoZero, Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra, (2019) and at Galeria João Esteves in Lisbon; and at Gulbenkian Foundation (2019).

The blending of references and stylistic fluctuation characterizes the work of Eugénia Mussa. By salvaging classic techniques of oil or gouache painting applied to series on canvas or cardboard, she explores and flexes the boundaries between repetition and variation, geometry and figuration, the real and the imagined, and reveals images whose dazzling chromaticity triggers immersive experiences. In her figurative work, the artist employs a technique classic oil painting with musical randomness, floating freely between styles, genres or pre-established paradigms. She pays particular attention to landscape and urban phenomena, mainly through her own pedestrian experience of Lisbon, where she absorbs impermanence and mobility. Another frequent source of inspiration for her paintings is her polysemic archive of images, which is composed of mundane images of domestic and urban daily life, found in books, postcards and in amateur videos recorded on Kodachrome film.