International Coproductions

In a career that spanned more than six decades of creative activity Joan Miró developed a formal idiom that transformed twentieth-century art. In painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, tapestry and printmaking Miró explored the language of signs, aligning his project with the Cubists’ interest in the structure of representation and the Surrealists’ investigation of writing and poetry. Conceiving his work as peinture-poésie (painting-poetry), the Catalan artist forged a language-based aesthetics whose legacy influenced an entire generation of postwar artists in Europe and America.

Born in Barcelona on April 23, 1893 Miró came of age at a time of major social transformations in his native Catalonia. A member of the first generation of artists and intellectuals for whom the Catalan language was the instrument of national consciousness, Miró felt more at home in the company of writers and poets than painters.  From his early participation in the Catalan literary avant-gardes during World War One, to his engagement with the poets and painters of the Rue Blomet in Paris, and shortly thereafter with the nascent Surrealist movement, Miró’s visual work was informed by his abiding interest in the language of signs and in the relations between images and texts.

As early as 1918 Miró spoke of the "calligraphy” of a tree or a rooftop, which he described "leaf by leaf, twig by twig, blade of grass by blade of grass, tile by tile.” Taking inventory of the world around him, Miró began to reduce objects to basic contours and essential elements. This process of reduction and simplification purged Miró’s work of any vestiges of illusionism and shallow cubist space. He began to think of the surface of his supports as sites for inscriptions and marks rather than as windows onto the world.  Reading would vie with looking in Miró’s practice. Eschewing non-objective painting as a dead end (in the mid-1930s Miró famously described the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création as an "empty house”), Miró turned to collage and to the world of objects to create complex signifying systems. His work in ceramics and sculpture put the reality of things under pressure, while his exploration of Japanese calligraphy in the 1960s tested the limits of signification. In fine-tuning and expanding his visual vocabulary, Miró developed a signature style that was entirely original, in the process inaugurating a new language for modern art. The eighty-five works by Miró in the Portuguese State Collection, spanning the years 1924–1981, allow us to chart this trajectory.

Mehretu is one of the most important artists working today. This will be her first exhibition in Portugal. Her paintings have redefined the way we think of painting as an instrument for mapping the world in time and space. Although Mehretu is known primarily for her monumental paintings that combine architectural plans and city maps - as part of research into the themes of globalization and identity - her work is based on a simultaneously rigorous and explosive exploration of drawing. Mehretu evokes several references, ranging from surrealistic drawings to Chinese calligraphy, also including the pictorial experiences of Henri Michaux produced under the influence of mescaline. Eliminations and deletions are as important as the marks produced by the artist, thus giving rise to a palimpsest of spaces built on the basis of visual and cultural memories.

Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents "Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974-2014”, the first museum survey of geometric mirror works and drawings by the celebrated Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (b. 1924, Qazvin).

"Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974-2014” will focus on Monir’s sculptural and graphic oeuvre over a career of more than forty years. While her practice has also encompassed figurative painting, it is the artist’s distinctive approach to geometric abstraction that provides a compelling entry point to an oeuvre in which objective concepts of repetition and progression, merged with the aesthetic traditions of Islamic architecture and decoration, allow for, in the artist’s own words, ‘infinite possibility’. 

The majority of the selected works are from the artist’s own collection, many of which have not been seen publicly since the 1970s.They include early mirror reliefs on plaster on wood, and a series of large-scale geometric mirror-works that formed part of the artist’s exhibition organized by Denise René in her galleries in Paris in 1977, and in New York in the same year. 

The exhibition will reveal how the compositional principles of this period were translated into larger-scaled commissions, including a series of etched glass doors she created for her New York townhouse in the 1980s, and into the more ambitiously-scaled mirror sculptures based on the concept of the geometric ‘families’ which the artist has produced in the last decade since reinstating her studio in Teheran in 2004. 

A selection of previously unseen abstract compositions on paper based on geometric principles produced by Monir between 1976 and 2014 reveals the central role of drawing as a conceptual foundation for the artist’s sculptural practice. The drawings also offer insight into the artist’s creative output when she was deprived of her studio during the early years of exile in the US following the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

"Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974-2014” also presents the opportunity to premier a new documentary film on Monir currently in production, directed by Bahman Kiarostami and produced with Iranian curator Leyla Fakhr that looks at the work and life of an artist whose career has been marked by the extremes of political change in her country and abroad.

Venue: Chrysler Musem of Art

Michael Krebber (Cologne, Germany, 1954) is one of the most influential contemporary painters working today. Exploring the continual exhaustion, withdrawal, engagement and renewal of painting, the artist’s practice is deeply embedded in its history and materials, yet characterized by both an affirmation and negation of the medium.

Reflecting Krebber’s approach to painting — its expressive language as well as its critical function —, this exhibition presents a selection of close to one hundred works from the past three decades from numerous private and institutional collections across Europe and the US. The paintings, drawings and sculptures on view range from hesitations and disavowals to a variety of motifs and gestures by turns emphatic, arresting or ironic — occasionally all at the same time. Together they trace as much a line of interested conviction, as a recursive arc of starts, fits and restarts, repetitions and murmurs.

A central reference in the conversation around the medium’s continued relevance, Krebber’s work constitutes a set of responses to a problem called ‘painting’, persistent in its fascination, obdurate in its delayed resolution.

‘Helena Almeida: Corpus’ exhibits the work of renowned Portuguese artist Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 1934), surveying her work in painting, photography, video and drawing over nearly five decades. The exhibition will highlight the importance of the body — registering, occupying and defining space — and its performative encounter with the world throughout Almeida’s work from mid-1960s until today. Along with the artist’s ‘inhabited’ paintings and the photographic series for which she is best known, the exhibition will also feature rarely exhibited work from throughout her artistic career. Through her early abstract painting, Almeida introduces the central concerns that define her artistic practice in a variety of media, in particular an interest in breaking the confines of pictorial and narrative space, which has always played a fundamental role in her work. As Almeida states, ‘my painting is my body, my work is my body’. 

To accompany the exhibition, Serralves will publish a catalogue, with separate editions in Portuguese, English and French, which will explore the artist’s working process and the importance of her oeuvre in the context of Portuguese art and feminist and performance-based artistic practices in the 1970s and subsequent decades. The catalogue includes hitherto unpublished essays by Peggy Phelan (Professor of Theatre, Performance and English at Stanford University), Connie Butler (Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, University of Los Angeles) and Bernardo Pinto de Almeida (historian and art critic, professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto) as well as an interview with the artist by the exhibition’s curators, João Ribas and Marta Moreira de Almeida.

‘Helena Almeida: Corp’ is curated by João Ribas, Deputy Director and Senior Curator, and Marta Moreira de Almeida, Head of Exhibitions of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Guided visit (6:30pm) with Marta Almeida, Head of Exhibitions of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art.

‘Helena Almeida: Corpus’ exhibits the work of renowned Portuguese artist Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 1934), surveying her work in painting, photography, video and drawing over nearly five decades. The exhibition will highlight the importance of the body — registering, occupying and defining space — and its performative encounter with the world throughout Almeida’s work from mid-1960s until today. Along with the artist’s ‘inhabited’ paintings and the photographic series for which she is best known, the exhibition will also feature rarely exhibited work from throughout her artistic career. Through her early abstract painting, Almeida introduces the central concerns that define her artistic practice in a variety of media, in particular an interest in breaking the confines of pictorial and narrative space, which has always played a fundamental role in her work. As Almeida states, ‘my painting is my body, my work is my body’. 

To accompany the exhibition, Serralves will publish a catalogue, with separate editions in Portuguese, English and French, which will explore the artist’s working process and the importance of her oeuvre in the context of Portuguese art and feminist and performance-based artistic practices in the 1970s and subsequent decades. The catalogue includes hitherto unpublished essays by Peggy Phelan (Professor of Theatre, Performance and English at Stanford University), Connie Butler (Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, University of Los Angeles) and Bernardo Pinto de Almeida (historian and art critic, professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto) as well as an interview with the artist by the exhibition’s curators, João Ribas and Marta Moreira de Almeida.

‘Helena Almeida: Corp’ is curated by João Ribas, Deputy Director and Senior Curator, and Marta Moreira de Almeida, Head of Exhibitions of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. 

‘Helena Almeida: My work is my body, my body is my work’ exhibits the work of renowned Portuguese artist Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 1934), surveying her work in painting, photography, video and drawing over nearly five decades. The exhibition will highlight the importance of the body — registering, occupying and defining space — and its performative encounter with the world throughout Almeida’s work from mid-1960s until today. Along with the artist’s ‘inhabited’ paintings and the photographic series for which she is best known, the exhibition will also feature rarely exhibited work from throughout her artistic career. Through her early abstract painting, Almeida introduces the central concerns that define her artistic practice in a variety of media, in particular an interest in breaking the confines of pictorial and narrative space, which has always played a fundamental role in her work. As Almeida states, ‘my painting is my body, my work is my body’. 

To accompany the exhibition, Serralves will publish a catalogue, with separate editions in Portuguese, English and French, which will explore the artist’s working process and the importance of her oeuvre in the context of Portuguese art and feminist and performance-based artistic practices in the 1970s and subsequent decades. The catalogue includes hitherto unpublished essays by Peggy Phelan (Professor of Theatre, Performance and English at Stanford University), Connie Butler (Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, University of Los Angeles) and Bernardo Pinto de Almeida (historian and art critic, professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto) as well as an interview with the artist by the exhibition’s curators, João Ribas and Marta Moreira de Almeida.

‘Helena Almeida: My work is my body, my body is my work’ is curated by João Ribas, Deputy Director and Senior Curator, and Marta Moreira de Almeida, Head of Exhibitions of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. 

The exhibition presents 10 exemplary SAAL projects that were realized, including architectural models, historical photographs, sound recordings and documentaries of the time in 8mm and 16mm film. The exhibition also promotes a contemporary reflection on SAAL and its repercussions with a series of photographic commissions on the current state of some of the emblematic SAAL projects by photographers André Cepeda, José Pedro Cortes and Daniel Malhão, together with an environmental installation by Ângela Ferreira that deals with the historical and political memory of this influential and bold moment of Portuguese architecture and society. 

The exhibition is curated by Delfim Sardo, Portuguese independent curator, Artistic Director of Lisbon’s Architecture Triennal of 2010, and is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal.

Curators: Suzanne Cotter

Production: Serralves Foundation

Photo: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian in her studio working on Heptagon Star, Tehran, 1975. Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai