Itinerant Exhibitions

This exhibition offers a glimpse of the formal and conceptual evolution of the work of Pedro Cabrita Reis (b. 1956), which is marked by the combination of memories of everyday gestures and actions, as well as by a wide range of extremely simple materials. 

Pedro Cabrita Reis’ work is marked by the definition of a distinctive poetical language that points to various moments in philosophy and art history, while springing from a field of personal and collective memories that are both invoked and rebuilt. The artist recycles reminiscences of gestures, actions, objects and everyday primordial spaces to create works whose power of association, beyond the material and the visual, reaches a metaphorical dimension that offers the viewer multiple varieties of experience.

Cabrita: Works from the Serralves Collection is part of the exhibition programme that celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the Serralves Collection.

Production: Serralves Foundation — Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto 

Annunciation, 1991

Plywood, Iron, Bronze

Collection of Serralves Foundation - Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto

Acquired in 1992

Since the early 1980s, Rui Sanches has been developing one of the most outstanding oeuvres in the field of Portuguese sculpture. His work, solidly anchored in extensive knowledge of art history, questions and reinvents the classical assumptions of sculpture, through the development of basic construction principles and the constant use and combination of wood and wood substitutes (in particular plywood) with other materials (iron, aluminium, mirror, plaster, etc.).

In Annunciation, wooden modules are assembled in a conversation area, thereby suggesting a permanent tension between the geometric and the organic, in a precarious and unsettling equilibrium. The artist aims to bridge the gap between classicism and contemporaneity by recalling one of the most important themes of medieval and Renaissance art – the announcement by the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she will conceive and become the mother of Jesus Christ – that features in the repertoire of almost all great masters (e.g. Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio).    

Rui Sanches lives and works in Lisbon. His work is represented in different national and international collections, including the José de Azeredo Perdigão Modern Art Centre, FCG, Lisbon, Serralves Foundation, Porto, Van Hedendaagse Kunst Museum, Antwerp, Extremaduran and Latin American Museum of Contemporary Art, Badajoz, Funchal Contemporary Art Museum – Fort of São Tiago, Elvas Contemporary Art Museum, Ministry of Culture, European Parliament (Portugal), Luso-American Development Foundation, Lisbon, and the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon.

Neal Slavin was a young photographer when he visited Portugal in 1968 with a Fulbright scholarship, taking many photographs of the country. His images, which reveal the influence of American 'street photography', make an indispensable contribution to understanding contemporary photography and constitute a very rich document to comprehend Portugal in the late 1960s, in the midst of the "benevolent dictatorship” (as some commentators called it) Some of his photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon in 1968. But it was only in 1990, in the context of FOTOPORTO - PHOTOGRAPHY BIENNIAL that a major exhibition was organised - PORTUGAL 1968 - which offered a broad presentation of Neal Slavin's ambitious project. His photographs held in the Serralves Foundation Collection will now be presented in Vila Real’s Municipal Theatre, in an exhibition that continues to question the image of Portugal, about 50 years after they were originally taken.

"O regresso do objeto” apresenta uma seleção de obras de artistas que sedimentaram os seus discursos artísticos nos anos 1980. Estes trabalhos marcam uma reação à predominância da arte minimal e conceptual nas décadas anteriores, através do regresso à pintura e à escultura e ao uso de materiais tradicionais como o ferro, o bronze e a madeira. Assistimos a um regresso a temas clássicos da história da arte, ao ressurgimento de um imaginário figurativo e metafórico associado a títulos poéticos e evocativos e à proximidade com as artes decorativas e a cultura popular. 

Esta diversidade relaciona-se com o começo da globalização que coloca em contacto e em influência mútua culturas muito diversas. A exposição é uma oportunidade para revisitar a produção artística desta década que, representando o fim do isolamento a que a ditadura tinha votado Portugal, revela um crescente sincronismo com o contexto artístico internacional. 

Esta iniciativa integra-se num programa de exposições e apresentação de obras da Coleção de Serralves especificamente selecionadas para os locais de exposição com o objetivo de tornar o acervo acessível a públicos diversificados de todas as regiões do país. 

Ângelo de Sousa (Lourenço Marques, Moçambique, 1938-2011, Porto), além de ser uma das figuras mais influentes da arte portuguesa da segunda metade do século XX, é um dos artistas melhor representados na Coleção de Serralves, com trabalhos realizados entre os anos 1961 e 2002, e que abarcam todos os meios artísticos a que ele se dedicou ao longo da sua prolífica carreira: desenho, pintura, escultura, instalação, filme e fotografia.

"Ângelo de Sousa: Quase tudo o que sou capaz” junta uma parcela muito considerável destas obras — desenhos, pinturas e esculturas — com o objetivo de sublinhar a importância da contaminação entre aquelas disciplinas para a evolução da sua prática artística: ao reunir obras de vários períodos da sua carreira, esta exposição combate a imagem dominante do pintor Ângelo, mostrando que o desenho e a escultura são não apenas facetas fundamentais da sua obra como aquelas em que porventura é mais evidente o espírito experimentalista da sua obra.  

Caracterizados por uma aparente simplicidade — o artista tenta obter, nas suas palavras, "o máximo de efeitos com o mínimo de recursos, o máximo de eficácia com o mínimo de esforço, e o máximo de presença com o mínimo de gritos” —, os desenhos, pinturas e esculturas de Ângelo de Sousa não ilustram conceitos, nunca partem de ideias, mas da ânsia de fazer e pensar com as mãos. A exposição sublinha esta vontade de trabalhar com elementos simples, ao apresentar as primeiras obras de Ângelo de Sousa, ainda figurativas mas apontando já para a depuração que viria a caracterizar o artista, lado a lado com os exercícios abstrato-geométricos — nomeadamente desenhos, telas e esculturas — que o impuseram como um dos maiores estudiosos da cor e da luz.  

"Ângelo de Sousa: Quase tudo o que sou capaz” integra-se num programa de exposições e apresentação de obras da coleção de Serralves especificamente selecionadas para os locais de exposição com o objetivo de tornar o acervo acessível a públicos diversificados de todas as regiões do país.

Produção: Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto 

Marking the 30th anniversary of the Serralves Foundation, the exhibition, Voyage to the Beginning and Back, presents works of significance or that occupy an important place in the genesis and history of the Serralves Collection and Museum: either because they were included within the original set of works of the Collection and Museum, or because they were produced specifically for Serralves, or because they had their first a public presentation in Serralves, or, finally, because they formed part of major exhibitions that constituted fundamental moments in either the artist’s career or the history of Serralves.

Besides occupying Serralves Museum and Villa, the exhibition extends to two places that symbolically exemplify Serralves’ relationship with the city of Porto, and with foreign visitors who visit the Museum: the Paços do Concelho (City Hall) of Porto City Council and the Leixoes Cruise Terminal, where it is possible to see works of art by Tatjana Doll (Steinfurt, Germany, 1970), Katharina Grosse (Freiburg, Germany, 1961) and Adrian Schiess (Zurich, 1959). 

Serralves's programming has always been closely related to the North of Portugal, either by presenting exhibitions of works by artists and from cultural contexts linked to what is considered to be one of Portugal’s most active artistic centres, or through exhibitions held in some of Porto’s most emblematic spaces and those of nearby cities. This exhibition offers an overview of this history, while projecting itself in a present and future, in which Serralves is increasingly sought by visitors interested in learning more about the North of Portugal and Porto and contemporary cultural events in the city, including those held in Serralves. In the intersection between the past and future, between nature and construction, Voyage to the Beginning and Back, a bit like the famous Möbius strip, is a journey without a beginning or end. All aboard! 

          

Voyage to the Beginning and Back is curated by Marta Almeida, assistant director of the Museum, Isabel Braga and Ricardo Nicolau, curators.  

Viagem ao Princípio: Ida e Volta assinala o 30.º aniversário da Fundação de Serralves através da apresentação de obras que têm um lugar destacado na génese e na história da coleção e do Museu. A exposição, além de ocupar os espaços do Museu, Casa e Parque de Serralves, estende-se para fora das portas da Fundação, numa tradução da sua estreita relação com a cidade do Porto – que, ao longo das últimas três décadas, se consubstanciou quer em importantes exposições de artistas e contextos culturais afirmados naquele que é considerado um dos centros de criação artística mais ativos em Portugal, quer através de mostras realizadas para alguns espaços emblemáticos da cidade. 

Nos Paços do Concelho apresentam-se obras do artista português Rui Chafes (Lisboa, 1966) e do norte-americano Matt Mullican (Santa Mónica, 1951), dois nomes que ocupam um lugar fundamental na história de Serralves. Rui Chafes, além de ter apresentado o seu trabalho em várias exposições no Museu de Serralves – e de ser um dos artistas mais amplamente representados na Coleção da Fundação –, tem uma relação particular com a cidade do Porto, onde expõe regularmente e onde inclusive se pode ver uma sua escultura pública (na Rua das Flores). Com um trabalho que se divide entre a prática do desenho e da escultura, o artista é um dos principais responsáveis pela renovação da escultura portuguesa nas últimas décadas. Conhecido pelos seus trabalhos em ferro em que associa características aparentemente inconciliáveis – nomeadamente atualidade e antiguidade, peso e leveza –, num constante desafio a todas as leis temporais e físicas (desde logo a gravidade), Rui Chafes tem-se destacado pela forma como interroga o papel da arte, e a sua relação com o espectador. Segundo o artista, "Se a arte não nos desperta, então não há nenhuma razão para a fazer. E quem a contemplar perderá o seu tempo.” Confrontando-nos com as características essenciais da prática artística, alheias a tendências e a temporalidades, e atento a questões primordiais que atravessam séculos – como a morte e a transcendência –, o trabalho de Chafes é simultaneamente contemporâneo e antigo: na intersecção entre passado e futuro, contribui decisivamente para fazer desta Viagem ao Princípio: Ida e Volta, exatamente como a famosa fita de Möbius, uma viagem sem princípio nem fim.             

IMAGENS DO DOMÉSTICO E DO URBANO NA COLEÇÃO DE SERRALVES

O título desta exposição corresponde à expressão com que asseguramos a alguém que a nossa hospitalidade é sincera; também institui a casa enquanto centro de uma relação entre duas ou mais pessoas - dialética que pode sintetizar a dinâmica entre artista e espectadores: as casas imaginadas por artistas serão temporariamente a nossa casa. 

É, de facto, muito considerável a quantidade de artistas para quem a casa é tema e pretexto. Os artistas e as obras presentes nesta exposição colocam o doméstico e o quotidiano no centro das suas preocupações, propondo diferentes interpretações daquilo que se entende por casa. 

Independentemente do ângulo adotado, a casa parece sempre encetar um jogo subtil entre o privado e o público. Talvez por isso alguns dos artistas presentes em "A Minha Casa é a Tua Casa” sublinhem a relação da casa com a rua e com a cidade, dedicando-se a pensar questões eminentemente urbanísticas.

Aos ideais utópicos e de libertação do homem que estiveram na base da arquitetura e do urbanismo modernistas, estes artistas contrapõem modelos vernaculares de ampliação de casas (as marquises) ou um território desordenado em que se mesclam organismos urbanos e rurais, outrora coerentes e estanques. 

Na exposição serão apresentadas obras de: Filipa César, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Ângela Ferreira, Fernanda Fragateiro, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Miguel Ângelo Rocha, Tony Cragg, Gil Heitor Cortesão, Juan Munoz

Produção: Museu de Arte Contemporânea — Fundação de Serralves, Porto

Alberto Carneiro, Alicia Framis, Ana Jotta, Blinky Palermo, Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos, Gabriel Orozco, Gabriela Albergaria, Giovanni Anselmo, Helena Almeida, James Lee Byars, João Queiroz, Joaquim Bravo, Joel Fisher, José Pedro Croft, Julião Sarmento, Leonor Antunes, Luísa Correia Pereira, Marcelo Cidade, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Pedro Portugal, Silvia Bächli

‘Table of Dreams: Two Contemporary Art Collections’ features approximately 30 works from the Serralves Collection and from the Collection of the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD),long-term loan to Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea. The title of the exhibition is taken from a poem by Alexandre O’Neill, an acclaimed poet and visual artist. ‘Table of Dreams’ is based on the table as both a metaphor and a source of living experience — a place of encounters, confrontations, communion, relaxation, and a social space, whether in the intimacy of the home or in an open and shared public space. 

The exhibition does not focus on a single form of artistic expression, but instead attempts to establish a confrontation between different modes of production and thinking. Through a dialogue between the two collections, the viewer is invited to engage in a plurality of universes and aesthetic, political and poetic questions.

Although the two collections have very different profiles and dimensions, they also have common elements and complement each other. The FLAD’s Collection includes a considerable number of drawings by Portuguese artists, while the Serralves Collection — particularly rich in the period from the 1960 until 2000s — provides an international context for these works.

‘Table of Dreams: Two Contemporary Art Collections’ is part of a programme of exhibitions and sited presentations of works from the Serralves Collection that furthers the museum’s aim of making the collection visible and accessible to a broader public around the country.

Production: Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto

Curator: João Silvério

Helena Almeida produziu desde a década de 1960 uma obra singular caracterizada por um marcado interesse pelo corpo, o seu lugar central — que regista, ocupa e define o espaço — e o seu encontro performativo com o mundo. As primeiras telas abstratas da artista abordavam de forma crítica os limites do espaço pictórico e as condições literais da pintura. Esse interesse estendeu-se nos anos 1970 à fotografia, onde o inconfundível espaço do ateliê da artista e o corpo feminino, fragmentado ou parcialmente obscurecido, se tornaram presenças recorrentes. É o caso da obra Sem título, de 1994-95, que integra esta exposição: uma sequência fotográfica de vinte elementos onde a artista se fez fotografar a distâncias várias e onde a escala e o número de elementos que a constituem, associados à dimensão espacial que sobressai do percurso/performance da artista pelo espaço fotografado, revelam uma abordagem inovadora à relação do corpo com o espaço.

Apesar de trabalhar em meios vários, a artista delineia meticulosamente esta coreografia e a composição de muitas das suas obras em estudos e desenhos preparatórios que evidenciam a sua utilização da cor e o poder psicológico do corpo humano. Nas palavras de Helena Almeida: "a minha obra é o meu corpo, o meu corpo é a minha obra”.

Angela Bulloch is part of a generation of British Artists that emerged in the late 1980s. Bulloch’s work addresses systems that structure social behaviour and play with the ways in which we construct and interpret information. Her multi-disciplinary installations merge conceptual rigour with sensuousness and humour. 'Heavy Metal Stack of Six' is one of a group of recent sculptures in which the artist uses digitally modelled geometric forms to create totem-like columns, which, while emanating an aura of perfection in the crisp fusion of their powder coated stacked rhombi, generate a set of constant perceptual variations depending on our physical perspective.

Survey exhibition of one of the most renowned contemporary artists.

Joana Vasconcelos (Paris, 1971) has exhibited regularly since the mid-1990s. The nature of Joana Vasconcelos’ creative process is based on the appropriation, decontextualisation and subversion of pre-existent objects and everyday realities. Sculptures and installations, which are revealing of an acute sense of scale and mastery of colour, as well as the recourse to performances and video or photographic records, all combine in the materialisation of concepts which challenge the pre-arranged routines of the quotidian. Starting out from ingenious operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the readymade and the grammars of nouveau réalisme and pop, the artist offers us a complicit vision, but one which is at the same time critical of contemporary society and the several features which serve the enunciations of collective identity, especially those that concern the status of women, class distinction or national identity. From this process derives a speech which is attentive to contemporary idiosyncrasies, where the dichotomies of hand-crafted/industrial, private/public, tradition/modernity and popular culture/erudite culture are imbued with affinities that are apt to renovate the usual fluxes of signification which are characteristic of contemporaneity.

Petit Gâteau is one of the works of the series "Delícias” ["Treats”].  Seductive as the strategies of conquest which govern our present age, the works from the "Treats” series display themselves as giant and colourful ice cream cones, slices of tart and cupcakes put together through the accumulation of different layers of plastic moulds — apples, pears, strawberries, blueberries, croissants and pretzels — commonly used to play at the beach. The oversized scale and the colourfulness capture the immediate attention of the viewer, despite not entirely concealing the consequent hollowness of the objects. Even food has not managed to escape the excess and exaggeration of the unabashed contemporary strategies of seduction which do nothing but compensate the absence of the essence through the exuberance of the appearance.

 

Visiting Serralves Park, we are naturally confronted with the mastery and beauty of its design, its historical signi?cance, the diversity of its colours, aromas, forms and textures, its fauna and ?ora. However, there is much more to admire beyond what can be naturally observed with the naked eye; that is what the exhibition ‘The Park in Macro II’ and this associated publication will allow us to rediscover. Macrophotography, whose purpose is to capture the details of minute objects or living beings often invisible to the naked eye, is the technique used in these large format images. The Park’s fauna and ?ora stand out from a vast, barely explored universe to cause admiration and awe for this other hidden world of mystery and fascination that also exists all around us. With these photographs, Serralves Park, a classi?ed National Monument since 2012, and recognized by Phaidon’s The Gardener’s Garden as one of the 250 most remarkable gardens in the world, gives visitors an additional reason for a prolonged enjoyment of its singular spaces.

REDISCOVER THE SERRALVES PARK WITH US!

Photography: Filipe Braga

Text: João Almeida, Rubim de Almeida, Ricardo Castilho, José Manuel Grosso-Silva,  Joana Marques, Ana Oliveira, Raquel Ribeiro, Pedro Sousa, So?a Viegas

This exhibition presents works from the Portuguese Secretary State for Culture (SEC) Collection on deposit in the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. It represents both the foundations of the Serralves Collection and a singular perspective on the Portuguese art context in the decades of the 1960s and 1980s. The works displayed express the various dialogues and formal confluences that Portuguese post-war artists were able to establish both with each other and with the global art context.

‘Body, Abstraction and Language in Portuguese Art’ is part of a programme of exhibitions and sited presentations of works from the Serralves Collection that furthers the Museum’s aim of making the Collection visible and accessible to a broader public throughout the country.

Production: Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto

The handmade and deliberately badly done, badly finished nature of some works by Ana Jotta (Lisbon, 1946) can be seen as a criticism of the efficiency and professionalism that seem to hold all activities (including artistic ones) hostage today. Arguing that the artist is a "transformer” of everyday objects - those we all see but only some recognise as bizarre, intriguing -, Jotta is a self-confessed copier and gatherer of objects, images and words, which she shamelessly misappropriates and uses with and without transformations: everything is digested, decontextualised and transformed into her own art.

In Joana, Ana Jotta appropriates discarded and poor materials (bicycle wheels and wine bottles), to parody one of the greatest symbols of luxury and power - the chandelier, omnipresent in palaces and other architecture linked to political and financial power. At the same time, Joana is directly related to two of the works that most immediately illustrate the artistic avant-garde - Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel 1914 and his famous bottle dryer 1917.  

This initiative is the result of a partnership between the Serralves Foundation and Infraestruturas de Portugal, Manager of Rossio Railway Station.

Katharina Grosse (Freiburg, Germany, 1961)

Somewhere between painting and sculpture, 'Atoms Outside Eggs' may be considered a sculptural painting, paradigmatic of Katarina Grosse’s experiments with coloured materials withdrawn from the conventional support of a painting to form painterly objects which aimed to bridge the gap between colour and matter.The title refers to the two different shapes used as supports for the painting, eggs and spheres. Grosse organized the elements in a particular constellation of more or less even distribution and spray-painted again over the already coloured surfaces. On the one hand she applied different colours in such a way that when seen from different angles each time particular colours dominated, such as purple when seen from one side, orange from another. Additionally she used for the first time a very fine nozzle for her spray gun to apply linear drawing in the shape of scribbles on top of the cloudy expansions of paint, thus bringing into the museum techniques and forms usually associated with street art, namely graffiti. Together with their dimensions, the arrangement of the eggs and spheres in the space contributes to cancel any privileged point of view for the perception of painting. Experiencing in the surrounding exhibition space an all-encompassing walk-through situation that is understood as a part of the work itself, the visitor may feel s/he has entered a world of Gulliver.Katharina Grosse’s work started to acquire a high degree of public visibility when she began to spray-paint rooms and facades towards the end of the 1990s. All the spectacular quality of such work notwithstanding, her practice has always been guided by her fundamental concern with basic questions of painting, in particular the way colours and shapes, or the applied paint and its support, relate.

Salão Nobre dos Paços do Concelho

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