Alberto Carneiro

Born in 1937^[1] into a farming community in northern Portugal, Carneiro pursued evening courses in Oporto and Lisbon before enrolling at the Oporto School of Fine Art, graduating in Sculpture in 1967^[1]. He mounted his first solo exhibition that same year, then travelled to London to study at St Martin's School of Art under Anthony Caro and Philip King, immersing himself simultaneously in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, structuralist anthropology, and Taoist philosophy.

In London he drafted the 'Notes Towards a Manifesto of Ecological Art' (1968^[1]-1972^[1]), published in 1973 in Revista de Artes Plasticas. The term 'ecological art' was chosen deliberately: it separated his practice from the land art of Richard Long or Hamish Fulton. The critic Isabel Carlos put the distinction plainly: where Long and Fulton made art from a weekend in the country, Carneiro's work condensed a lived rural experience.

His signature works, which he called 'involvements' (envolvimentos), place single, unaltered natural materials inside gallery space: a reconstructed cane field in 'The Cane-field: Memory - Metamorphosis of an Absent Body' (1968^[1]), tree trunks in 'A Forest for Your Dreams' (1970), and monumental bundles of rye in 'A Field After Harvest for Our Body's Aesthetic Delight' (1973-1976^[1]). The Cane-field encoded colours, letters, and numbers on each cane as a combinatory system for visitors to inhabit with their own bodies and memories; it is now held in the Colecao Caixa Geral de Depositos in Lisbon.

In 1977^[1] he took part in 'Alternative Zero' (Alternativa Zero), the landmark exhibition organised by Ernesto de Sousa that presented Portuguese^[1] art as a genuine avant-garde formed under, and in quiet opposition to, the Salazar and Caetano dictatorships.