An exploration into the wild and wonderful world of Luísa Correia Pereira, an obscure jewel of late modernism and “énfant terrible” of the Portuguese art scene.
Luísa Correia Pereira: World Child is a work of articulated fiction and art history. Luísa Correia Pereira (1945–2009), the “enfant terrible” of Portuguese painting, left Lisbon as a teenager for Rio de Janeiro and Paris, where a Gulbenkian fellowship and the mentorship of Júlio Pomar shaped an art of ladders, staircases, cacti, and tricksters. She returned with the Carnation Revolution of 1974, worked among the children of Trás-os-Montes, loved the poet and philosopher Cristiana Veiga Simão, was committed by her father to the Miguel Bombarda Hospital, and died in 2009.
Omar Kholeif recounts her story through two searchers: Blake, a museum director on the eve of retirement who buys a small watercolor and cannot let it go; and Mar, a graduate student who inherits Blake’s research and walks a dead woman’s streets in a dead man’s footsteps. Letters from Luisa’s cousin are interspersed between the chapters, recalling Paris in the spring of the revolution and the “uniform grey veil” induced by Correia Perreira’s psychiatric medication.
With a foreword by the philosopher Maria Filomena Molder, and an interlude by Sarah Perks, this sixth and final volume of imagine/otherwise asks what it costs to be remembered and who does the labor of dreaming on an artist’s behalf.
Co-published by artPost21.
