Bertina Lopes (1924–2012) was a Mozambican-Italian painter, sculptor and activist, considered one of the most important women artists from Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Maputo to a Portuguese father and an African mother, she studied in Lisbon, where she engaged with Portuguese Modernism and international avant-garde movements. After returning to Mozambique in 1953, cultural nationalism became a crucial ideological and artistic influence, and her work combined African iconography with the political events of the time. Following a forced return to Europe, she settled in Rome in 1963, where her paintings expressed an end to colonialism and a desire for independence; from the late 1990s her work turned to free, gestural abstraction in extraordinary color. She held retrospectives in Rome in 1986 and 2002, and her work was shown at the 60th Venice Biennale and the 36th São Paulo Bienal.
