Ofélia Marques

Lisboa, 1902 – Lisboa, 1952

A self-taught visual artist born in the early 20th century, Ofélia Marques was a member of the Portuguese modernist movement, closely following its international developments alongside Bernardo Marques, a companion during a significant part of her career.

Essentially recognised for her work in painting, it was in drawing that her practice proved to be most innovative. She was a regular contributor to periodicals and illustrated books and was a pioneering creator of children’s comic strips. It was, however, in her multiple deeply psychological self-portraits and in her series of portraits of friends, artists and writers imagined as caricatures of children that her work acquired a greater technical and reflective power.

Her erotic work, only presented to the public posthumously, reveals a more transgressive, irreverent, cosmopolitan and experimentalist facet of her work. Ofélia Marques’ intimate homoerotic scenes depicting females are captured variously in black and white compositions, in luminously expressive and contrasting works of colour, and in India ink, graphite, crayon, pastel and gouache.

With a lushly sexualised ambience, these works reveal subtle and empathetic relationships of domination and subjugation, in which the presence of a cat appears perhaps as a metaphor.

Lígia Afonso
[Plano Nacional das Artes e Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian]
Curator, teacher and researcher born in Lisbon in 1981
Text originally written for Google Arts & Culture apropos the exhibition “All I Want, Portuguese Women Artists from 1900 to 2020”, curated by Helena de Freitas and Bruno Marchand