Eugénia Mussa (1978, Maputo, Mozambique) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. She attended a Drawing Program and a Painting Program at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual in Lisbon (2009), and a Foundation Course in Fine Arts from City and Islington College in London (2002). Her diasporic background influences her work, but in her paintings, she doesn’t directly tackle the theme of African identity but rather fuses it with memories, images, and feelings collected along the way. A mixture of references and stylistic fluctuation characterizes Mussa’s practice.
Rescuing classic oil or gouache painting techniques applied in series on canvas or cardboard, she explores and bends the boundaries between repetition and variation, geometry and figuration, the real and the imaginary, and reveals images whose dazzling chromaticism triggers nostalgic experiences. This artist employs a classic oil painting technique with musical randomness in her figurative work, floating freely between styles, genres, or pre-established paradigms. A frequent source of inspiration for her paintings is her vast archive of images, made up of memories of mundane everyday life, both domestic and urban, which she finds in books, postcards, and amateur videos recorded on Kodachrome film.
