Drinking Water from Lilau

Nuno Barreto did his academic training at Escola Superior de Belas Artes do Porto in 1966, from where he went on to a postgraduate degree at the prestigious Saint Martin's School of Art in London.

He was an Assistant Professor at Faculdade de Belas Artes of Universidade do Porto and later invited by the Macao government to elaborate the project of the Academia de Artes Visuais of Instituto Cultural de Macau, which he directed since its foundation in 1988. He was later the director of the Escola de Artes Visuais of Instituto Politécnico de Macau from 1993 to 1997.

Nuno Barreto’s artistic estate, donated to Fundação Oriente in 2019, takes us on a journey through his artistic production, in a retrospective of the evolution of his visual body of work, which peaks in the reputation achieved with the Eastern period.

Acrylics, gouaches, sketchbooks, sketches, notes, journals, books, catalogues and photographs carry us to his experience and transformation from abstract painting to figurative painting, as he gradually understood his purpose of capturing the soul of a place as well as the people who inhabit the city of Macau, the land which, in his own words, "entered his blood never to leave".