Some notes about the Madeiran painter Alice Sousa, author of the work Chorinho (“Little Cry"), which, among others of her own, are part of the MUDAS collection.

She was born in Funchal, in São Martinho, at Sítio do Papagaio Verde, on May 21, 1937. She completed the 4th year of Painting at the Oporto College of Fine Arts in 1959, then headed to Belgium. In 1963, she completed the National Course of Fine Arts of Rio de Janeiro. She began her career as an Arts teacher in 1967, integrating the teaching team of the Madeira Academy of Music and Fine Arts (AMBAM). She taught, for some years, at the Institute of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Santa Maria), Brazil. Currently retired, she taught Visual Arts in several high schools in Madeira and mainland Portugal.

In Oporto, she lived and shared experiences with Madeirans Amândio de Sousa, Marcelo Costa, Gil Bazenga, Martha Telles and Manuela Aranha. By that time, she lived and corresponded with Herberto Helder.

Since 1969, she has exhibited in Portugal and Brazil, presenting a vast curriculum with dozens of individual and collective exhibitions.

Admirer of Chagall, she is a painter of the exaltation of color, putting it at the disposal of her poetic narrative in a conciliation between reality and fantasy, in a reconciliation between nostalgia and memories: “From Oporto, (...) my colleagues, (...) teachers, (...), even Júlio Resende said (...), that what I do, my works, they have a poetic nature. (...) If there's one painter I admire extraordinarily, it's Chagall."

In Chorinho, from 2001, Alice de Sousa moves on abstractionism, in a tenuous differentiation between geometric and informal.

Credits: MUDAS. Contemporary Art Museum of Madeira