Portuguese artist Lourdes Castro, silhouette pioneer, dies at 92

Lourdes Castro, the Portuguese artist celebrated for her silhouette portraits and still lifes, died on 8 January 2022. Her work explored presence and absence through outlines of friends, plants, and objects in diverse materials like canvas, embroidery, and acrylic. After studying at Lisbon's School of Fine Arts, she moved to Paris in 1957 to escape Portugal's dictatorship. There, she co-founded the experimental magazine KWY (1958–63) with painter René Bértholo, inspiring a movement that included Christo, Jan Voss, and Portuguese émigrés Costa Pinheiro, José Escada, Gonçalo Duarte, and João Vieira. Initially experimenting with lyrical abstraction, her work appeared in the 1959 Biennale de Paris before she embraced New Realism, creating collages of found objects in silver-painted boxes. In 1962, she began silk-screen works, with early silhouettes like Sombra Projectada de Claudine Bury (1964) depicting a friend holding a cigarette, and Sombra Projectada de Christa Maar (1968) showing an abstract outline on plexiglass. Returning to Madeira in 1983, she produced paintings inspired by the island's flora, such as Sombras à volta de um centro (1980–87), where she traced shadows cast by flowers using crayon, colored pencil, or China ink. Castro described her shadow-play works as capturing 'the littlest thing that I can grasp of a person.' She continued working throughout her life, leaving a legacy of innovative artistic exploration.