Maria Leal da Costa
Maria Ana de Sousa Leal da Costa (Évora, Portugal, November, 1964), is a Portuguese sculptor. Life. She is the daughter of an artist mother, and an architect father, she studied in the Superior School of Fine Arts of Lisbon and exhibits her work since 1994. Has a studio in Marvão, in Quinta do Barrieiro, Alentejo, Portugal, where she lives and works since 1999 and where she is developing her project, Alentejo sculpture park. The books open doors for her to fly to unknown stops, where she finds much of her inspiration, showing how they are an  open window to the world. Traveling companion of Camões, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Gonçalo M. Tavares, among other writers, she carves her digressions on the iron, marble and bronze, inviting the public to join her in her flights, to transcend, discover and penetrate into the core, in order to contemplate and transmit, demystify and to make us the pedagogy of a fragile planet but always open to all of us. She struggles with hard materials, as if it were paper, with its natural expressions, the oxides, the textures, the colours or the fractures, in a  permanent asceticism to transmit the beautiful, the unimaginable that thrill us, moves us and transport us to a path full of endless discoveries. It takes us to an enchantment to hear the resonance of a world unknown to us and where we want to penetrate into an infinite space of its dreams, into free imagination. Her works are part of numerous public and private collections, in Portugal, Belgium, Spain, China, United States, Lithuania, Italy. "The stone flies, floats, runs, speaks... just like the words!", (Maria Leal da Costa). Biography. Maria Leal da Costa was born in Évora, in 1964. She  took the Interiors course at António Arroio School and between 1982 and 1986 attended the Sculpture course at Superior School of Fine Arts of Lisbon. She exhibits her work since 1994. She has a studio in Quinta do Barrieiro, Marvão, Portugal, where she lives and works since 1999.