Filipa Tojal (b. 1993) is a visual artist living and working in Porto. She holds a degree in Painting from FBAUP and completed her Master's at Tokyo University of the Arts, where she lived for four years. She is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at FBAUP. She was awarded scholarships by MEXT (Japan) and FLAD (USA). She has held solo exhibitions in cities such as Beijing, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Berlin, and has taken part in several international artist residencies. Her practice emerges from painting and expands into installation, exploring tonal and material subtlety in a sensitive relationship with landscape and surrounding space.
Filipa Tojal’s residency was born from a collaboration with the School of Arts at the Autonomous University of Lisbon. Her practice begins with painting and extends into installation — an attempt to resolve, within space and material, questions that originate on the canvas. Working with rigid materials such as iron and stainless steel was something new — a real “mind-opener” — bringing new relationships with the landscape and surrounding space. During the process, she worked in the painting workshop with Mr. Américo (painting and finishing technician), exploring painting on metal. In the metal shop, she learned to use the roller, to deburr, to polish — and also made use of audiovisual equipment. She experimented with new techniques and listened to the gestures of the factory. “People taught me small steps,” she said. The result was presented in the exhibition “Between Surfaces” (“Entre Superfícies"), at the School of Arts of the A.U. of Lisbon.
Credits
partnership with Escola das Artes da Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa
