Lourdes
Castro

Lourdes Castro (b. 1930 in Funchal/Madeira) spent a year in West Berlin with her then husband, René Bertholo, who was a fellow of the Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) in 1972. She returned in 1978 at the invitation of the DAAD—whereby her grant did not come from the Program and her residency was at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. In the mid-1950s Castro began experimenting with screenprinting, and in the early 1960s she created material collages in the style of the Nouveaux Réalistes. From 1962 onward she produced works in a variety of media on the theme of “shadows”: she painted the outlines of shadows of objects and people projected onto canvas; worked with Plexiglas and cut-out positive/negative forms; embroidered “lying shadows” on bedsheets; and created a “shadow herbarium” of 100 plants. In 1965 Castro began working on a “family album” of shadows from many different realms—painting, history, humor, science, theater, philosophy, literature, religion, etc.—which encompassed fourteen volumes at the time of her BKP Award Grant.

During her first stay in Berlin in 1972/73, Lourdes Castro developed a shadow theater comprised of mobile forms in space—Teatro Ambulante de Sombras—which she and her later partner Manuel Zimbro subsequently presented in South America and Europe. In 1973 the Artists-in-Berlin Program presented Ein Jahr in Berlin, a joint exhibition of works by Lourdes Castro and René Bertholo; Castro’s contribution included various screenprints on Plexiglas, embroidered Liegende Schatten (1968), and photographs from the shadow theater she had made in 1972. The two-person exhibition, which was accompanied by a small catalogue in the form of a brochure, was the first in a new series of BKP exhibitions which, rather than showing a comprehensive retrospective of the fellows’ artistic practice, presented a straightforward “report” focusing specifically on the works and projects they had developed in Berlin. On three days in September and October 1973, Lourdes Castro presented her shadow theater at the Akademie der Künste in West Berlin.

In 1978/79 the portfolio Lourdes Castro: Les Ombres was published by Rainer Verlag in Berlin; it comprised fourteen black-and-white prints on canvas in an edition of forty-eight copies. In 1998, together with Francisco Tropa, Castro conceived an installation as Portugal’s contribution to the Bienal de São Paulo.

Text: Eva Scharrer

Translation: Jacqueline Todd