Estimate

5.000 - 6.000

Session

4 February 2016

Hammer Price

Description

Acrylic and embroidery on linen fabric

250x200 cm

Category

Modern and Contemporary Art

Additional Information

Ilda David started to exhibit her paintings in the 1980s. The creation
of a dream-like and poetic realm is since them a distinguishing feature
of her pictorial production. Frequently resorting to literary texts, in
particular poetry, as their starting point, her paintings have, in turn,
seduced and inspired many poets to write new poems and books of
a clear complicity — Al Berto, Manuel António Pina, Joaquim Manuel
Magalhães, José Tolentino Mendonça, to name a few. The artist’s work
was largely promoted through book illustration. Among her most
remarkable illustrations are her plates for anthologies of poems by Saint
John of the Cross (1982), Walt Whitman (1984) and T. S. Eliot (1985) and
the series of paintings she created for editions of Mariana Alcoforado’s
Cartas portuguesas [The Portuguese Letters] translated by Eugénio de
Andrade (1993), José Tolentino Mendonça’s translation of The Song of
Songs (1997) and João Barrento’s Portuguese version of Goethe’s Faust
(1999).
The tree and the forest are two recurrent motifs in Ilda David’s work.
Her paintings display enchanted scenic forests as well as stormy ones.
As a symbol of ancestry and essentiality, the tree in Almoço no campo
I [Lunch in the Countryside I] is depicted by means of a technique —
embroidery — traditionally associated with feminine needlework,
a guarantee of rootedness and the stability of the home. On the other
hand, the convulsed and incomplete traces born from the repeated
gesture of pulling and cut the thread serve one of the features that
better characterize Ilda David’s painting practice: the exploration of
the fragment.