Francisco Tropa

Francisco Tropa was born in Lisbon in 1968, where he lives and works.

Francisco Tropa creates complex installations that bring together different media, including sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, projections, and performance, with references to literature, art history, and science. While his practice is rooted in sculpture, he uses these different forms to explore subjects such as the body, death, nature, landscape, memory, origins, and time. His works gradually reveal themselves, often containing hidden meanings that extend beyond what is immediately visible. 

At Atelier Calder, Tropa continued developing his project TSAE (Trésors Submergés de l’Ancienne Égypte, 2008–15), an expansive installation inspired by a vision of the cosmos. Tropa developed three groups of works in Saché: Le Songe de Scipion (2015) evokes the vision of the cosmos revealed to Scipio in a dream and recounted by Cicero, which Tropa reimagined through metal sculptures representing the sun, moon, and earth. The sculptures played with the perception of suspended volumes and their movement. Les Antipodes (2015) consisted of sculptures in wood, marble, bronze, and metal, whose simple geometric forms could be manipulated to create complex architectural arrangements and seemingly endless configurations. Finally, Scripta (2015) brought together objects and their bronze replicas across the studio floor to create a landscape-like installation.