Luísa Cunha dies at 77: the Portuguese artist who turned sound into sculpture
Luísa Cunha, a pioneer of sound art in Portugal and winner of the 2021 EDP Foundation Art Grand Prize, has died in Lisbon at 77.
Luísa Cunha, one of the most singular voices in Portuguese contemporary art — literally: her own voice was often her raw material — died this Monday at Lisbon’s São José Hospital after battling cancer. She was 77.
Who was Luísa Cunha?
She was the artist who proved that a sentence spoken in the right place can be worth a sculpture. Trained at Ar.Co — Lisbon’s Centre for Art and Visual Communication, where she also taught in the 1990s — Cunha built a body of work spanning sound, words, photography, video, drawing and sculpture, almost always with a disarming economy of means: short sound installations, interjections and instructions that caught visitors off guard and made them truly listen to the space around them.
Institutional recognition took its time — she admitted as much, with irony — but it arrived in style: in 2021 she won the EDP Foundation Art Grand Prize, and in 2023 the MAAT museum in Lisbon staged her first major retrospective, gathering every medium she had worked with across three decades.
What does she leave behind?
A body of work you hear as much as you see, spread across public and private collections, and a deep influence on a generation of artists who learned from her that humour and rigour are not enemies. In a field that so often mistakes size for significance, Luísa Cunha did the opposite: minimal works, enormous ideas.
Portuguese art loses a major figure; anyone who visits her installations will, even so, keep hearing her.
See also: Sara Correia’s fado conquering the world and this summer’s cultural agenda. The artist’s career is documented by the EDP Foundation.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: Manuelvbotelho / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
