Pancio Guedes, 1925-2015, artist and architect
About:
Pancho Guedes (born in 1925), architect, painter, sculptor, collector and patron, played an important cultural role during the years he lived in Mozambique. This is true because of his own work, which brought together several worlds, as well as for his role as mediator between artists of all traditions, the wider public (local and international), and the institutional artistic world, which he had access to at the time.
His artistic and architectural education had began at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1945 under a number of exceptional teachers, among them Heather Martienssen, Donald Pilcher and John Fassler, who from very early on persuaded him that architecture was above all an art, integrating all the other plastic and design arts : sculpture, painting, interior design, landscape design and urban design. He showed quite exceptional talent as a designer and draughtsman from the beginning, and spent a lot of his time painting and drawing, and devouring every book he could get hold of on the subjects that really stimulated his imagination : Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Picasso, Juan Gris, Latin American architecture and mural painting and any artists for whom the integration of the arts was important.(quote from article Cedric Green, 2006, in catalogue Venice Biennial)