Julião Sarmento studied at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes in Lisbon, where he majored in painting and also took courses in architecture. Throughout his professional career, though, he has made use of other media such as drawing, sculpture, photography, film, holograms, video, performance art and installation. He held the Juan Gris Chair at the Complutense University of Madrid (2007).

Along with architecture and memory, the fundamental themes running through Sarmento's work are desire and eroticism, manifested in his depiction of the female body. However, Sarmento does not depict specific women —indeed, he conceals their identity, sometimes even showing them without heads— but stereotypes. Despite the eclecticism of his work and its resistance to classification, his so-called 'white paintings' illustrate this personal obsession. On a deliberately neutral white background, he draws the female figure accompanied by texts which, in poetic, Duchampian fashion, are shown as an image (literary references are a constant in his work). This paradoxically cold eroticism, beneath the contained, minimalist aesthetic appearance, transfers the tension between work and referent to the space of the viewer, who is turned into a voyeur.

Amongst other venues, Julião Sarmento held solo exhibitions at the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) (Valencia, 1994); the Galleria d'Arte Moderna (Bologna, Italy, 1998); the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington D.C., 1999); the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1999) the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Germany, 2004); the José Guerrero Centre (Granada, 2008); the Tate Modern (London, 2010); the Contemporary Art Centre of Malaga (2010); Fundaçao Serralves (Porto, Portugal, 2012); the Carrillo Gil Museum (Mexico City, 2013); Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (Las Palmas, 2015). He represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale (1997). He participated in Documenta 7 and 8 (Kassel, Germany, 1982 and 1987); the Venice Biennale (1980, 1997 and 2001); and the São Paulo Biennial (2002).

Isabel Tejeda