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Baldessari, John
John Baldessari (National City, EUA, 1931 - Los Angeles, EUA, 2020)Baldessari Sings LeWitt, 1971- Video (Betacam), b/w, sound, 19' and 15’, PAL
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1999
- This video-performance involves the appropriation of Sol LeWitt’s text ‘35 Sentences on Conceptual Art’, one of the fundamental texts in the development of conceptual art, published in ‘Art-Language’ magazine in 1969. Humorously, Baldessari sings each one of the sentence-manifestos in the tunes of popular songs, thus removing them from their theoretical seclusion with the aim of expanding their reach to a potentially wider audience. At once a tribute and a critique, ‘Baldessari Sings LeWitt’ reflects the artist’s concern with the fact that someone might claim a position of authority in art. At the same time, the work explores the democratic potential of video as a medium.Intrinsically linked to conceptual art, Baldessari’s work explores the relationship between image and language through a critical and experimentalist practice that resorts to a variety of media, such as photography, video, painting, performance or installation.
Balka, Miroslaw
2 x (270 x 90 x 8), Ø 0,8 x 927, 101 x 41 x 12, 3 x Ø 12, 1994- Iron, felt, soap, steel cable (5 elements)
- Dimensions variable
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2006
- '2 (270 x 90 x 8), Ø 0,8 x 927, 101 x 41 x 12, 3 x (Ø 12)' is typical of the sculptures developed by Miroslaw Balka in the 1990s, a time when he abandoned figurative sculpture to pursue simpler forms. This is emphasized by the titles of his works, often measurements of segments of the artist’s own body or the length of his reach. The materials have a powerful biographic, symbolic and metaphoric charge, associated with traces left by an absent body. The title of the work is a description of its elements: two sheets of rusted iron, slightly raised from the ground and placed side by side on the floor like tomb stones, each measuring 8 x 90 x 270 cm; a steel cable, 0.8 cm in diameter and 927 cm in length, that crosses the space longitudinally suspended over the sheets;, another grey iron sheet, measuring 101 x 41 x 12 cm, hangs on an adjacent wall, while on the floor next to the wall stands a small iron element 3 cm in height and 12 cm in diameter. Miroslaw Balka is forever marked by the historical memory of World Word II and the Holocaust. In his hometown of Otwock, known as a popular health resort before the War, three quarters of the town’s population were killed or transported to Poland’s death camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz after Nazi occupation. In his work the tragic dimension of human existence, and particularly the horrors of recent twentieth-century history, go hand in hand with personal exposure to illness, pain, suffering and anguish. In the artist’s own words: ‘Illness and death were experiences of my childhood that are projected into my work. (...) It’s my personal archaeology. What I call my returns’.
The Fence, 1998- Iron, barbed wire, wire mesh, soap, acrylic paint on canvas
- 270 x 450 x 450 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Artists' donation 1998
- 'The Fence' was conceived specifically for the exhibition ‘Privacy’, which brought together works by Polish sculptor Miroslaw Balka and Belgian painter Luc Tuymans at Serralves in 1998. The show did not just feature works of the two artists side by side; instead, it was an opportunity for them to work together for the first time. Sharing a mutual admiration since their first encounter in 1992, they decided to create a collaborative work testifying to the dialogue and reciprocity that had thrived between them.'The Fence' was made in response to the singular architecture of the Serralves Villa, a 1930s manor, whose style reflects both the owner’s obsession with art deco and his determination to showcase French sophistication and taste in Portugal. Rather than perceiving the Villa as a home, Balka and Tuymans regarded this former private residence as a token that enabled the owner to be seen in a certain way by the society of his time more than to lead a certain day-to-day lifestyle. The former salon, located on the ground floor, was particularly perplexing to the artists. The space, which is visible from every point in the building, including the upper floor, seemed ‘too large’ to them, so that the idea of circumscribing it came about as ‘quite logical’.Their enclosure of wire mesh and barbed wire is reminiscent of a space under surveillance, offering no immediate clue as to whether it could be used for confinement or protection. The cakes of soap that Balka fixed in the mesh resemble snowballs and evoke a situation of aggression but, again, offer no clue as to the (internal or external) location of the aggressor, or as to whether the attack has already taken place or might be imminent.Visually permeable, the fence allows for a view of both sides of Tuymans’ painting that hangs inside it, thus reinforcing the transfusion between interior and exterior. Based on a found watercolour, the painting represents, in schematic brushstrokes that mimic the wire enclosure and in a yellow tone rendered phosphorescent by the raw canvas, a quasi life-size, spectral Sinterklaas, a morbid and faded version of the garish, roly-poly and good-humoured Santa Claus featured in Coca-Cola ads. The symbolism of family and homeliness associated with the Christmas season is utterly subverted via a strategy that is common in Tuymans’ oeuvre, in which repulsion, disenchantment or loss cast their shadows over seemingly innocuous themes.Hidden behind Balka and Tuymans’ (in)offensive fence lurks the troubled history of the Second World War, which ravaged both artists’ countries with particular ferocity.
Barateiro, Pedro
Travelogue, 2006- Video installation, 16mm transferred to DVD, B&W, silent, 5’16’’, rear projection screen, wood, video projector, DVD player. Ed.1/3 + 1 A.P.
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2014
- ‘Travelogue’ (2006) by Pedro Barateiro (Almada, 1979) presents a non-linear narrative based on Portuguese propaganda films called ‘Actualidades’ [Current Affairs], made in the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. The images used by Barateiro date from 1958-61 and were selected by the artist at the Department of Documentary Film in the National Archive of Moving Images (ANIM) in Lisbon. By showing archival images that document the building of new cities and their infrastructures, ‘Travelogue’ critically reviews the colonialism that underpinned twentieth century modernism. Barateiro’s work involves the use of found objects, archival images, film, language, performed readings and text. He uses these varied materials, approaches and presentational strategies to make visible the cultural contradictions that underlie historical discourses of power that continue to haunt the present.
Teoria da Fala (fábrica), 2009- 16mm film transfered to DVCam and DVD, b/w, silent, 2'26". A.P.
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Artist's donation 2010
- The Rio Vizela Factory, one of the largest textile factories in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the financial source that allowed its owner, the 2nd Earl of Vizela, to commission and build the Serralves Villa between the early 1930s and early 40s. For his first solo exhibition in Serralves, ‘Teoria da Fala’ (2009), artist Pedro Barateiro decided to research the relations between the ‘pink villa’, its architectural and decorative refinement, and the absolutely interlinked histories of art déco, capitalism and colonialism. To reveal their shared past, Barateiro brought part of the factory’s history into the Serralves Villa. At the factory, he filmed some architectural elements, in particular the office areas, and carried some of its furniture to Serralves. The images in the film were captured in the factory and resort to certain objects (some of which, like the bench and the chair were shown in the exhibition) to create an exemplary testimony of this industrial ruin’s dereliction.
Teoria da fala (orelha objecto), 2009- 16mm film transfered to DVCam and DVD, b/w, sound, 2'11". Ed. 1 + 1. A.P.
- Variable dimensions
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Artist's donation 2010
- During his first visits to the Serralves Villa to prepare his first solo exhibition (hosted there in 2009 and occupying the supposedly more intimate, more domestic area in the villa’s first story), Pedro Barateiro was intrigued by the eminently theatrical quality of the space. In fact, the best terms to describe the work process that originated the exhibition would be ‘decoration’, ‘industry’ and ‘theatre’. The artist decided straight away to invoke that theatricality by using associated with audience seating areas - apparent in several sculptures created specifically for the exhibition -, but also through videos with direct references to theatre. Such is the case of ‘Teoria da Fala (orelha objecto)’, which depicts an object found by the artist in Lisbon’s National Museum of Theatre. Among the items in the museum’s collections - which include customs, furniture and stage set elements - this strange wooden ear is the object that perhaps we would least associate with theatre. In the video, the ear is seen to gyrate in a hypnotic movement accompanied by repetitive music, whose sound pervaded several of the exhibition rooms, functioning a sort of score that contaminated the perception of the multiple pieces.
Baumgarten, Lothar
Lothar Baumgarten (Rheinsberg, Alemanha, 1944 - Berlim, Alemanha, 2018)Da Gefällt's mir besser als in Westfalen, Eldorado, 1968 - 1976- I prefer beeing here than in Westphalia, Eldorado, 1968 - 1976
- 187 colour slides, 36'52 '' soundtrack. Ed. 2/5
- Dimensions variable
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1999
- The 187 coloured images recorded in the marshes of the Rhine river, between Düsseldorf and Cologne, that comprise this work portray natural environments describing the life cycle of a single day. Manipulating through inclusion of ephemeral sculptures that blend into the environment - the images evoke the utopia of Eldorado and simulate an idyllic atmosphere, reinforced by the overlapping sounds of a rainforest -, Baumgarten highlights the opposition between nature and culture, between the natural and artificial. These considerations are permanent features of Baumgarten’s oeuvre, which focuses on demystification of the mental constructions of specific spaces, through a historical and cultural perspective - such as colonialism and the Western influence on native peoples.
Bertholo, René
René Bertholo (Alhandra, Portugal, 1935 - Vila Nova de Cacela, Portugal, 2005)Palmier, 1966- Palm Tree, 1966
- Painted aluminium, electric fan
- 80 x 66 x 13 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2000
- 'Palmier' [Palm Tree] is one of the first objects in the series of ‘reduced models’ that René Bertholo started in 1966 and led him away from painting for almost a decade. The Pop-inspired formal and chromatic simplicity of these objects addresses his search for archetypal images of landscape and nature similar to those often to be found in travel guidebooks. Palmier represents a small paradisiacal island caressed by balmy winds that gently sway the branches of a palm tree. Meant to induce tranquillity and concentration, the gentle movement is generated by the intermittent action of a mechanical fan that, left intentionally, visible, reveals Bertholo’s bricoleur side and the way he channelled to his art an old passion for engines and mechanisms.The playfulness, reminiscent of the childhood universe and the naïf imaginary universe, of clear pop inspiration, is a constant feature of Bertholo’s oeuvre, and was already visible in his previous animated paintings, populated with imaginary and dreamlike elements.
René Bertholo (Alhandra, Portugal, 1935 - Vila Nova de Cacela, Portugal, 2005)Littérature conjugale, 1966- Marital Literature, 1966
- Oil on canvas
- 116.4 x 89.2 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition financed with funds donated by Ilídio Pinho 1999
- The title 'Littérature conjugale' [Marital Literature] refers to the literary genre that appeared in France in the nineteenth century with the purpose of preventing adultery. Its target readership was the ascending bourgeoisie, who wished to see itself depicted through the fictional re-creation of its social and romantic aspirations. Bertholo’s painting is characterized by the use of flat colours and the hovering presence of a multitude of small figures, objects and abstract forms without any apparent order that define an intuitive and fragmented iconography of the domestic and matrimonial universe. The work belongs to the cycle of ‘scattered paintings’ that Bertholo began in 1960 and where he sought to develop a narrative figuration that would value aspects of reality and daily life reconstituted from imagination and memory.
René Bertholo (Alhandra, Portugal, 1935 - Vila Nova de Cacela, Portugal, 2005)Nuage à surface variable, 1971- Variable surface cloud, 1971
- Painted aluminium, engine
- 91.3 x 95 x 19 cm
- Coll. Portuguese State Secretariat of Culture, long-term loan to Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Deposit 1990
- Refraining from painting for about a decade, in 1966 René Bertholo began a series of objects, that he called ‘reduced models,’ of which ‘Nuage à surface variable’ is one example. His desire to express elementary forms of the landscape and nature meant that these objects were presented with great formal and chromatic purity. In this sense, they draw close to Pop Art and the playful universe of childhood: both in terms of their childlike simplicity and the toy-like movement that drives them.The playfulness, reminiscent of the childhood universe and the naïf imaginary universe, of clear pop inspiration, is a constant feature of Bertholo’s oeuvre, and was already visible in his previous animated paintings, populated with imaginary and dreamlike elements.
René Bertholo (Alhandra, Portugal, 1935 - Vila Nova de Cacela, Portugal, 2005)Une Année a Berlin, 1973- A Year in Berlin, 1973
- Silkscreen on paper. A.P.
- 56.8 x 76 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Donation by Galeria 111 1989
- 'Une Année à Berlin' [A Year in Berlin] narrates the academic year that René Bertholo spent in the German city, following the invitation by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) to study electronics applied to art. The work is based in the commentaries and photographs included in 'Diário de Berlim' [Berlin Diary] by Lourdes Castro, who accompanied him during his stay. Combining text and images in comic-strip vignettes, the artist explores the communicative vocation of art, it into understood and practiced as a natural extension of everyday reality. One of the situations narrated is the development of random movement electronic programmes, which he carried out with the help of his friend, the engineer Antoine Cuvelier, and started to use in the motorized objects created during that period. The use of silkscreen printing shows his interest in this technique, which he had intensely explored during the production of 'KWY' magazine in 1958-1963/64, and his simple and immediate visual language is a statement of the artist’s intention to make art that is accessible to all.The playfulness, reminiscent of the childhood universe and the naïf imaginary universe, of clear pop inspiration, is a constant feature of Bertholo’s oeuvre, and was already visible in his previous animated paintings, populated with imaginary and dreamlike elements.
Birnbaum, Dara
Mirroring, 1975- Video, b/w, silent, 4:3, PAL, 6'01"
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2010
- Alternating between real and reflected images, 'Mirroring' questions the formal mechanisms of film and the artist’s own sense of identity. This work alludes to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic interpretation of formation of the ego as a result of identification with one’s own image in the mirror, thereby emphasizing the creation of a double image that, through a process of focusing and blurring, occurs through possible disconnection between artist’s body and her performative body.Attempting to manipulate a medium that is itself highly manipulative, Dara Birnbaum has often explored subversion, deconstruction, and redefinition of the aesthetic and ideological power of media images. By appropriating the language and imagery of television images, the artist’s multimedia and video installations have sought to recontextualise the icons of pop culture and television genres, interpreting them mainly on the basis of representation of women, thus enabling his work to be interpreted from the perspective of the feminist art movement that emerged in the 1970s, linked to the use of video.
Broodthaers, Marcel
Marcel Broodthaers (Bruxelas, Bélgica, 1924 - Colónia, Alemanha, 1976)Etagère jaune avec lettres de l'alphabet, chiffres en terre glaise, 1968- Yellow Shelf with Letters of the Alphabet, Numbers in Clay, 1968
- Wood, clay, paint
- 88 x 76.5 x 15.5 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1998
- ‘Etagère jaune avec lettres d'alphabet, chiffres en terre glaise’ exemplifies Marcel Broodthaers’ interest in the relation between object, image and concept, through the intersection of painting, sculpture and language. Here, an alphabet - the structuring element of writing - appears in a disorderly and fragmented manner, contradicting a possible didactic function and critically invoking the convention of museum display through the shelf on which objects are exhibited.
Bulloch, Angela
Heavy Metal Stack of Six, 2014- Powder coated steel
- 300 x 80 x 50 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2017
- 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.
Burmester, Gerardo
Sem título, 2008- Untitled, 2008
- Painted and polished aluminium, Plexiglas (3 elements)
- 220 x 327 x 16 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2012
- In this wall relief Gerardo Burmester presents a set of interconnected rectangular elements of polished aluminum and coloured and clear Plexiglas. Refusing expression and narrative, they create rhythms of transparency and opacity in space, confronting colours, lines and geometries and emphasizing the minimalist and abstract condition of an anti-naturalist ‘landscape’.The artist first emerged in the second half of the 1970s, carrying out several performance actions and configuring a pictorial practice that associated neo-romantic references with an ironic critique of the condition of painting. In the late 1980s, the artist began creating objects and installations, using materials such as veneered wood, polished aluminum and industrial felt, to engage the viewer in games of visual seduction.
Sem título, 2008- Untitled, 2008
- Painted and polished aluminium, Plexiglas (5 elements)
- 235 x 461 x 16 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2012
- In this wall relief Gerardo Burmester presents a set of interconnected rectangular elements of polished aluminum and coloured and clear Plexiglas. Refusing expression and narrative, they create rhythms of transparency and opacity in space, confronting colours, lines and geometries and emphasizing the minimalist and abstract condition of an anti-naturalist ‘landscape’.The artist first emerged in the second half of the 1970s, carrying out several performance actions and configuring a pictorial practice that associated neo-romantic references with an ironic critique of the condition of painting. In the late 1980s, the artist began creating objects and installations, using materials such as veneered wood, polished aluminum and industrial felt, to engage the viewer in games of visual seduction.
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