A white, Luso-descendant artist, part of a Mozambican generation that included Alberto Chissano, Malangatana Ngwenya and Ernesto Shikhani, d'Oliveira was an important activist for the independence of Mozambique. Due in part to her personal life — d'Oliveira was in a relationship with a woman from 1990 until she died in 2019 — she has been written out of the history of an artistic and political scene in which she played a major role.
Featuring work made between the 1970s and her death in 2019, Sem Título's recurring figures and tableaus testify to d’Oliveira’s inner conflict as well as her unmistakable vision — pseudo-biblical serpents and floods, couples in an Edenic garden, and winged creatures that could be angels or devils, abound.
Exploring our oldest stories via her own lens, d’Oliveira delivers painting as parataxis — images like clauses in a sentence, seemingly unconnected but for their proximity. Who are these hybrid dog-people? Is Red Riding Hood’s mouth open ready to scream, or to eat the wolf? Yet, for all her dabbling with divinity, an all-too-human thread connects every tableau.
Throughout Sem Título, bodies are heavily, almost ruefully present; inflected with some insidious incorrectness, the sense is one of punishment — by invisible forces that leave visible as well as psychic wounds, and by the artist’s own hand.
From her earliest ink drawings to paintings dated just a decade ago, each composition implies a fantastical continuum, reaching into both the past and the future beyond its frame. Sem Título revels in narrative while resisting its inevitability: in the consequential universe of her practice, we glimpse d’Oliveira as both subject and author. At last, she takes her rightful place at the heart of her story.
