Six centuries of artistic creation
1936-2011 Moçambique
Malangatana's cultural background was marked by his African ancestral roots and a European universe conveyed by colonialism. In his works, influenced by the Ronga imaginary, he represents human, mythological, allegorical, animal, hybrid and imaginary figures, distorted, anguished beings, who interweave into one another in a compact mesh filled to exhaustion by dozens of faces. In this painting the anthropomorphic figures, individually visible in open and expressive eyes, metamorphose into graphic forms, form a compact and tense smudge, accentuated by the monochrome of blue tones, interrupted by the whites of the eyes and the mouths. The void is non-existent, the pictorial density oppresses, the facial expressions challenge. For Malangatana, art served "to protest against injustice and also to arouse joy in people".
| Acrylic on canvas, 145 x 129 cm
| CRATO. Municipal Museum of Crato
