Mendanha Vânia

Vânia Mendanha, born in Forjães-Esposende (Brazil), graduated in sculptural arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Porto (FBAUP). She regularly takes part in group and individual exhibitions, and has been teaching visual arts at the École internationale du Luxembourg since 2002. The artist creates murals, medals and trophies, including the Angola Sports Gala trophy, from which a gold-plated form was made for the country’s president. Several of her bronze sculptures, created in partnership with her father and brother, are exhibited in public spaces: Homo-Viator (Barcelos), Man of the Sea (Madeira Island), Dom Afonso Henriques (Rio de Janeiro) and Monument in honor of “Fabrice Miguet” (Normandy). In 2022, the Luxembourg Art Prize awarded her a certificate of artistic merit. All her works are autobiographical, an extension of the artist’s body, ideas and concerns. These themes are reflected in the printed and cut words, in the overlapping layers of plaster, in the unfinished fragments of the female body, in the shadows that light creates inside the metal structures. In her sculptures, Vânia attempts to unite the duality of belonging, between place of life and place of origin, here, Luxembourg and Portugal: her two territories.