Freedom is as vital as breathing
Born to a small farming family in the interior of Portugal, Maria Lino’s work has a strong connection to earth, changing cycles, and germination.1 Her sculptures, paintings, and drawings show marks of labor, traces of reflection, and notes of patience. What matters most is learning to see, “seeing things as if for the first time. Not naming things. Forgetting the name of what you see, observing, walking all around, and turning, this is to see the light.”2 Therefore, she draws in order to perceive things.
Lino says that organic shapes are very important to her, and in her work, we can see traces in large black layers of ink, together with drawings of dragonflies, crickets, birds, and mushrooms that emerge dancing on white paper as if they were moving. With accurate lines, the artist sculpts in wood the curves that enclose the body. By reducing contours to a minimal state, Lino finds shapes that blend physical and organic traces;3 gestures that imprint on paper and wood the metamorphosis of what we see.
“I paint whatever I feel like and I think that this statement is what best defines my work.”4 Those were her words in 1979, near the end of a decade marked by restlessness, liberation movements, and questioning of traditional authority. Migrating from Portugal to Germany in the final years of the dictatorship and positioning herself as a young painter was her journey to freedom.
She arrived in Hamburg with a briefcase full of drawings, a few clothes, and no place to sleep. Carrying what she did best, the artist started a new life in a foreign country completely on her own – and initially uncertain that she was there to stay as she had planned to head to Japan. In 1970, having saved enough to buy a one-way ticket to Hamburg, Lino arrived without speaking a word of German, initially communicating only in French.5 Surviving on several underpaid jobs, the artist was working hard but was not able to raise the means to travel on to Asia.6 By then she worked at the horse races in Bahrenfeld. There are a number of oil paintings that originated from details of the drawings she did of people who went to see the horses and had their backs to her.
After some months abroad, Lino was admitted to study painting at the HFBK Hamburg and received a small scholarship to cover her basic living costs. It was then that she had classes with Almir Mavignier, one of the pioneers of concrete art in Brazil. She later studied with Franz E. Walther, an interdisciplinary installation and conceptual artist known for his fabric objects, as well as Ulrich Rückriem, a sculptor notable for his monumental stone sculptures. All of these professors made an impact on her work.
Graduating in 1977, Lino recognized that the years she lived in Hamburg were decisive for her life choices. Even if the 1970s were marked by restlessness and the questioning of traditional authority,7 in Portugal, women still did not have the same rights as men, and with an arts degree Lino was only permitted to work as a teacher. Not having sufficient financial independence, she would be expected be a housewife and mother in her homeland.8 In Hamburg, everything was new to her at the time. She spent joyful years there in which she had the freedom and strength to pursue what she wanted to do. Breaking the paradigms that attributed women submissive roles – not only to their husbands, but also to society itself – producing art was a weapon against political and social oppression.9 Lino thrived and blossomed amid all the adversities she faced in order to establish herself as a female artist in a foreign land while affirming her own desire, “a desire to understand, to see what I have really seen.”10
In a time when there were not many immigrant woman artists working in Northern Europe, having to study and afterwards to marry in order to hold a permanent residency visa, struggling financially to support her art practice and exhibitions over the decades, Lino was nonetheless able to show and sell her work in more than forty solo exhibitions and participated in as many group exhibitions in Germany and Portugal. Rejecting the word “inspiration,” she preferred to say that what she felt was necessity – in other words, producing artworks was as essential, indispensable, and vital as breathing.11 Freedom is indeed central to understanding this artist’s context. Lino had the courage to choose other paths than the generation of women that came before her: “I am what I am. But it is not enough for someone to be sure of themselves — it is a question of history. Women are always the weaker sex.”12
Up until the end of the regime in 1974, the lives of women in Portugal were oppressively limited. Numerous restrictions were imposed with some variations throughout the 41 years of the dictatorship.13 A small country with an empire larger than the whole of Europe, the regime advocated women’s remaining in the home and married women’s subordination to their husbands, and celebrated the roles of wife and mother.14 While the dictatorship enhanced the oppression and exploitation of women, the resistance they developed during fascism, on multiple fronts, has undeniable importance and meaning.15
As early as 1976, the Portuguese constitution enshrined the principle of equality and other fundamental, individual, and collective rights. Challenging authoritarianism, patriarchy, sexism and colonialism, the profound economic and social transformations that happened during the 1970s had a deep impact on the condition of women: universal suffrage, the right to strike, equal pay for equal work, equal access to all professions, divorce, public school and university access, the national health service, maternity rights.16
After 27 years in Hamburg, having lived before in Lisbon and Porto, Lino returned to her homeland and opened a studio in Portugal’s Beira Interior Norte region, where she still lives today. Even if somehow isolated due to her relocation to the interior of the country in Feital, Lino says that “the best place to see my work is where it happens.”17 Naming her working space Atelier Temos Tempo the artist literally invites us to take our time. And to see takes time, as Georgia O'Keeffe once said.18 The use of the plural in naming her studio is very telling as she uses it as a space for exchange, a project for learning by doing with no hurrying, and to share knowledge with her community at its own pace.
Until 2011, Lino organized the Simpósio Internacional de Arte (Feital International Symposium) there, an artistic residence in the wild mountains of Beira. By providing the conditions for reflection and contact with nature in a truly rural environment, over the years she invited international artists to join her studio and spend three weeks there producing artworks, exhibiting, and temporizing them through talks and debates among art historians and teachers.
It is in the context of Lino’s personal story, artistic working process, and taking this as a question of history as she situates it that we can see the development of her life trajectory as an artist. As she accurately puts it, “those who earn their freedom do not let anyone take it away from them.”19
This article was first published in Lerchenfeld #67, July 2023., pp. 26-30
