A Brief History...

The KWY Group was formed in Paris between 1958 and 1964 around the magazine of the same name, founded by a young generation of Portuguese artists fleeing the conservatism of Salazar's regime. The founding core was composed of René BERTHOLO, Lourdes CASTRO, António COSTA PINHEIRO, Gonçalo DUARTE, José ESCADA, and João VIEIRA. The choice of the name "KWY" was in itself a political and provocative act, as these three letters were then absent from the official Portuguese alphabet, thereby symbolizing exile, rupture, and a desire for absolute international openness.

The collective quickly expanded to include foreign figures living in the French capital, notably the Bulgarian artist CHRISTO and the German painter Jan VOSS. Unlike traditional avant-gardes, the group deliberately dispensed with a rigid artistic manifesto or a single theoretical doctrine. The twelve issues of their magazine, published during this period, became the laboratory for a hybrid aesthetic where urban imagery, daily life, and the objects of the metropolis entered the art space, prefiguring a cosmopolitan realism.

The creative process of the KWY Group was part of a rich network of exchanges with the most radical movements of the time, such as the Nouveau Réalistes, Fluxus, or the Spanish collective El Paso. Their editorial collaborations extended to magazines like Daily-Bul, and they associated with leading figures of the Parisian scene such as François DUFRÊNE, Raymond HAINS, Bernard HEIDSIECK, and Yves KLEIN. This intrusion of reality into their paintings, installations, and objects placed the Portuguese New Figuration at the heart of the international artistic upheavals of the post-war era.

Although the group ceased its collective activities in 1964, its legacy remains essential to understanding the evolution of contemporary art in Portugal and Europe. It succeeded in breaking national cultural isolation by establishing a direct dialogue with technological and social modernity. In 2015, a major retrospective organized by the Serralves Museum in Porto, under the direction of Suzanne Cotter, highlighted the historical importance of KWY as a bridge between pictorial tradition and new forms of 20th-century visual expression.