FRANCISCO VIDAL (B. 1978)

Francisco Vidal blends African wax-print textiles with 1980s hip-hop culture, Cubism and elements of street art and graffiti. Born in Portugal to Cape Verdean and Angolan parents, Vidal deals with ideas closely tied to the diaspora experience. He views himself as a product of cultural fusion, and examines the concept of creolisation in his work. Vidal now lives and works between Lisbon and Luanda. He is best known for his boldly coloured Machete paintings on either hand-made paper or canvas, which are often stitched together to form large-scale installations. In Lisbon, his studio is in a former bomb factory which supplied napalm during the Angolan Civil War.
Utopia Luanda Purple features rich passages of deep blues and purples overlaid with swirling layers of vibrant orange patterns which evoke printed African textiles.
Francisco Vidal represented Angola at the Angolan Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and exhibited at the Expo Milano of the same year. His work is held in several renowned public and private collections including the PLMJ Foundation, the EDP Foundation Collection and the Scheryn Collection. In 2019 he presented his first solo exhibition at Tyburn Gallery, London.