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Machado, João
João Machado (Coimbra, Portugal, 1942)Sem título, 1970- Untitled, 1970
- Synthetic ink on wood
- 149.2 x 191 x 60 cm
- Coll. Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, long-term loan to Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto. Deposit 1990
- João Machado has become an influential graphic designer, responsible for the renewal of graphic arts in Portugal. It is therefore curious that his sculptures are now interpreted retrospectively in light of his design projects. The latter’s characteristics are used to define his concerns as a sculptor, in particular the stylization of forms and the use of bright colours.
João Machado (Coimbra, Portugal, 1942)Sem título, 1970- Untitled, 1970
- Synthetic enamel on wood
- 76 x 76.5 x 55 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Artist's donation 1989
- João Machado’s untitled work exemplifies his explorations in the field of abstract sculpture. The technical and material literality of its construction, allied to a formal simplification, reinforces a connection to industrial materials and mass production, while the inclusion of undulating forms in the composition dilutes the geometrical coldness and introduces an idea of motion.Despite his fine arts training, João Machado focused and developed his activity in the area of design, which was crucial to the affirmation of the field in Portugal. Indeed, it is through the characteristics of his graphic projects that his sculptural practice can be put into perspective; a practice with a clear affiliation to pop art in its use of very sharp, contrasting colours and stylized forms.
Madani, Tala
Flashlight in Mouth, 2013- Oil on canvas
- 40.7 x 35.6 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2013
- 'Flashlight in Mouth' is one of a suite of small canvases by Tala Madani on the subject of light and dark. Here, light assumes the literal form of a flashlight held against the mouths of men and functions as a source of projection, a microphone that both amplifies and stifles speech. The subject matter is in playful tension with the formal qualities of the painting and its modulations from luminescence to velvet opacity, and from illuminated illustration to mute abstraction. Madani’s oeuvre is nourished by a tradition that combines the graphic flourish and volubility of Persian calligraphy and traditional coffee house painting from her native Iran, social realism and American post-war abstraction. Like Paula Rego, who Madani has cited as an influence, the artist also employs satire and black humour. Childhood scenes linked to eschatological and sexual experimentation, or grotesque representations of adult men physically involved in violent, incomprehensible situations, are frequent in her work. Her paintings are an irresistible parody of the ways in which representation is directed and framed, adopting absurdity as the perfect cover for content that resists censorship and betrayal through pictorial and narrative processes.
Maillol, Aristide
Aristide Maillol (Banyuls-sur-Mer, França, 1861 - Banyuls-sur-Mer, França, 1944)La baigneuse drapée (La Seine), 1921- The Draped Bather (The Seine), 1921
- Bronze, dark green patina. A.P.
- 179 x 69 x 45 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Donation in memory of Geogina Illing 2011
- Artistide Maillol is known for his classically inspired sculptures of female nudes. 'La Baigneuse drapée (La Seine)' [The Draped Bather (The Seine)] is an example of the works for which Maillol is most well known, the image of a bather representing the ideal of Mediterranean beauty. The date of the sculpture is contemporary with the Serralves Villa, and Maillol was acquainted and collaborated with Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann (1879-1933), the French architect and decorator who had a decisive role in the architectural and decorative programme of the Villa, although it is unknown whether Maillol himself knew of Serralves. This work was donated to the Serralves Foundation in 2011 by Robert Illing, former consul of the United States of America in Porto as a homage to his wife, Georgina Illing, who was a great enthusiast of the arts and the Serralves project.
Mangelos, Dimitrije Basicevic
Skica za manifest o kicu, 1977 - 1978- A sketch for the kitsch manifesto, 1977 - 1978
- Gold leaf and acrylic paint on plastic, metal
- Globo: 26 cm de diâmetro
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2006
- Used as devices for his manifestos, terrestrial globes appear regularly in Mangelos’ work as a very schematic condensation of his ideas. ‘Skica za Manifest o Kicu’ is a critical assessment of kitsch, considering it ‘an instrument for negating the value of feeling another kind of beauty’, as written in the work. The artistic practice of art historian and critic Dimitrije Ba?icevic, who adopted the pseudonym Mangelos, developed along the fault line between word and painting. He used the rules of language to avoid the irrationality of painting, following a strategy that he called ‘no-art’, and focusing on themes from the fields of philosophy, art and civilization.
Martins, Jorge
Itinerário erótico, 1971- Erotic Itinerary, 1971
- Oil on canvas
- 129 x 160.2 cm
- Coll. Portuguese State Secretariat of Culture, long-term loan to Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Deposit 1990
- 'Itinerário erótico' [Erotic Itinerary] marks the consolidation of a refined degree of stylization in the work of Jorge Martins, which resulted from the studies, of seventeenth-century theories of colour on the detailed pictorial description of things which he started in 1963. As if illuminated, the various elements that compose a scene from intimate life ? a body lying down late in the night ? stand out from the grey background. The scenographic arrangement of the objects give this painting a narrative quality, even if there is no story to take in, only the intention of promoting a dynamic and active vision, opposed to the contemplative gaze that abstract art requires. The colourful representation does not erase the general coldness of the scene. In the synthetic perfection of their form, the objects seem artificial, emptied or spectral, as suggested by the chair, which is drawn only in its external outlines.
Marwan
Marwan (Damasco, Síria, 1934 - Berlim, Alemanha, 2016)Situation, 1966- Oil on canvas
- 162.2 x 130 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2015
- ‘Situation’ reveals an intensely individualistic practice: an isolated figure, standing in a kind of non-place, seems to wait for the unfolding of an action locked in a fragmented state of existence. ‘Situation’ belongs to an important series of paintings made by the artist at night while he worked in a furrier’s studio during the day. The painting serves as a psychological self-portrait that gives expression to his exile condition and the personal impact of the political and social conflicts (particularly the Arab-Israeli war of 1973) that shook the Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century.
McBride, Rita
Parallel Lines, 2008- 8 mm steel (single edition)
- 188 x 92 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2011
- Rita McBride’s work addresses ideas related to public space and the reception of culture. Her sculptures recreate familiar elements from our immediate environment. McBride sometimes dramatizes objects related to architecture and design, often through the use of unusual materials and shifts in scale. As such, she examines acquired notions of form, function, and material in relation to a vocabulary that challenges the myths of progress induced by modern ideology, namely industrialization, mass production, and the laws of efficiency.
Timeley Circles, 2008- 8 mm steel (single edition)
- 113.5 x 180 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2011
- Rita McBride’s work addresses ideas related to public space and the reception of culture. Her sculptures recreate familiar elements from our immediate environment. McBride sometimes dramatizes objects related to architecture and design, often through the use of unusual materials and shifts in scale. As such, she examines acquired notions of form, function, and material in relation to a vocabulary that challenges the myths of progress induced by modern ideology, namely industrialization, mass production, and the laws of efficiency.
McCall, Anthony
Anthony McCall (St Paul's Cray, Reino Unido, 1946)Circulation Figures, 1972 - 2011- 16 mm film transferred to video (b/w and colour, 35’42’’ loop), 2 mirrors, newspapers, b/w and colour photocopies. Ed. 1/3
- Dimensions variable
- © Anthony McCall. Purchased jointly by Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, with funds from the Film, Video, and New Media Committee 2013
- Nearly forty years separate the staged event in Anthony McCall’s 'Circulation Figures' (1972/2011) from its completion as an art work - decades in which notions of mass media and privacy central to the work have themselves profoundly changed everyday life. For the original event in 1972, the artist invited fifteen photographers and filmmakers ‘to meet at a prepared space in order to record their own presence’. McCall had arranged the space - a studio at the London Polytechnic Film School - with a pair of large mirrors facing one another, torn newspapers and magazine pages covering the floor. Each participant was told that ‘the subjects of the event and your camera are the other photographers and filmmakers’, and so to record one another as they moved around the space. McCall had intended to edit the resulting material into a film, as well as to create some installation environment to present it that evoked the original space. Yet the plan to do so remained shelved for decades, due to both ‘a lack of technical means to present continuous time’, as well as shifting directions in the artist’s own work toward the installations of projected light for which he is best known. ‘As a result’, McCall explains, ‘working on the completion of 'Circulation Figures' in 2011 involved some time travelling back and forth: my structuring principles would have been entirely familiar to me in the 1970s, but in editing the footage and planning the final work I made full use of digital technology’. For the ‘Off the Wall’ exhibition at Serralves in 2011, McCall revisited the decades-old film footage and still images of the ephemeral performative event to create a thirty-five minute film. This was projected on a screen suspended in a room defined by two mirrored walls, their 4:3 aspect ratio matching that of standard television and film. As these mirrors are parallel, they cause the images to ‘repeat into the distance in an infinite regress’. The result is an environment in which the viewer, surrounded by refracted images and his/her own reflections, becomes part of the work.While occupying a specific moment at the intersection of the histories of event-based, time-based and installation art, 'Circulation Figures' gains particular resonance given how ‘contemporary conventions of self-representation have blurred the line between our public and private lives’, the artist explains. The participants in the 1972 event, ‘circling round one another and assiduously producing images only of themselves, looked, then, like some kind of hallucination’. Yet today, in an era of social media and the arm’s length self-portrait, ‘those same figures, acting the way they do, seem almost familiar’. 'Circulation Figures' presages this shift, while relying precisely on the same technology for its realization.‘The original 'Circulation Figures' occurred at a time when the attention of the mainstream media monopolized the representation of reality’, McCall explains. ‘As a result, private life for most remained relatively private, limited to photographs in the personal album.’ The information revolution of the intervening decades has inexorably altered this relationship to images. ‘The circulation of images has become both radically decentralized and massively expanded’, McCall argues, ‘with the surveillance of public spaces providing the sinister edge to this apparent democratization. As a consequence, an unmediated, unpublicized private life seems to be in the process of vanishing.’
McKenzie, Lucy
Lucy McKenzie (Glasgow, Reino Unido, 1977)Alhambra Motifs I, 2013- Oil on canvas
- 340 x 360 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2014
- 'Alhambra Motifs I' is one of a group of three paintings by Lucy McKenzie in which she expands her compositional repertoire beyond European traditions to the geometries of Islamic decoration and architecture. McKenzie’s visit to the former Moorish palace in Southern Spain from which 'Alhambra Motifs I' takes its title was inspired by her reading of the writings of the nineteenth-century architect Owen Jones, and her continued interest in how the orientalist forms of the neo-gothic translate into a decorative vernacular that is perpetuated in the present day facades and interiors of small businesses in Brussels where she lives. In addition, the interest in such motifs is also a confrontation with the modernist insistence on the elimination of decoration, perhaps best exemplified by Adolph Loos’ influential text 'Ornament and Crime' (1910). McKenzie has described the source material of the decorative programme of the Alhambra Palace as being part of a world cultural heritage that is acknowledged as exemplary through its UNESCO protected status, and that in which the politics of gender, and particularly the place of women, are deeply embedded in their structures.Art and craft and the social and cultural histories of design have long informed Lucy McKenzie’s approach to painting. Her canvases are conceptual propositions that allude to historically-bound genres of representation in which the ‘high arts’, generally associated with a named author, cross with anonymous collective processes, such as mural painting and trompe l’oeil decoration. McKenzie’s interest in the so-called ‘minor arts’ of craft and decoration can also be understood as a response to the gender, culture and social hierarchies that are implicit in the visual traditions that surround us.
Meireles, Cildo
Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1948)Mutações Geográficas: Fronteira Rio - São Paulo, 1969- Geographical mutations: frontier Rio-São Paulo, 1969
- Leather, earth
- 41.4 x 42 x 42 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2003
- 'Mutações Geográficas: Fronteira Rio-São Paulo' [Geographical Mutations: Rio-São Paulo Border] records an action that Cildo Meireles carried out in the second half of 1969 at the border between Paraty and Cunha, two contiguous Brazilian municipalities belonging to administrative regions in the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The first part of the action consisted of digging two holes, one on each side of the border; then, to deposit in each plants and debris that had been taken from the opposite hole; and, third, to recreate the whole operation in a leather box. This included dividing the inside of the box into two halves, placing in each one a sample of earth collected in each neighbouring state. As the wet earth quickly caused the untreated leather in the original box to rot, in November of the same year the artist replaced it with the box that still exists today. Looking like a case used in scientific expeditions, this object suggests an anthropological reading of the territory that illustrates the psychological and social constraints imposed by geographical demarcations and the political nature of the cartographical separation of places that are physically linked.In its constant critical interpretation of the world, Cildo Meireles’ oeuvre redefines conceptual art bringing it into contact with sensorial experience and the critical use of ideological and anthropological circulation systems. His work resorts to a plurality of media and materials to approach far reaching political, philosophical, aesthetical and social issues such as power relations, the spaces and modes of communication or the legacies of history and art history.
Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1948)Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos - Projecto Coca-Cola, 1970- Insertions into ideological circuits (Coca-Cola project), 1970
- Glass, metal, Coca-Cola (3 elements)
- 24.5 x 20 x 5.8 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Artist's donation 2000
- An example of the artist’s use of mass media and mass consumer items, Cildo Meireles uses the Coca-Cola bottle deposit return system (in which the bottles were returned empty to the multinational corporation to be refilled and sold again), to print subversive messages onto them. As they are collected and redistributed into the consumption circuit, the bottles become a vehicle for sentences expressing critical opinions allusive to American imperialism and the Brazilian dictatorship, or questioning the art system and its relationship to consumer society.In its constant critical interpretation of the world, Cildo Meireles’ oeuvre redefines conceptual art bringing it into contact with sensorial experience and the critical use of ideological and anthropological circulation systems. His work resorts to a plurality of media and materials to approach far reaching political, philosophical, aesthetical and social issues such as power relations, the spaces and modes of communication or the legacies of history and art history.
Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1948)Pertubarão!, 2014- Resin polyester, acrylic paint on fiberglass, stainless steelEd. 1/3
- Dimensions variable
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Donation by Paulo Pimenta and the artist 2015
- As is often the case, the title of Cildo Meireles’ most recent work - 'Pertubarão!' - is based on a wordplay that merges the Portuguese nouns ‘perturbação’ [disturbance] and ‘tubarão’ [shark]. The work is composed of three elements in the shape of fins that represent a family of sharks installed on a lawn, which in this case substitutes the sea. Viewers, who are always a crucial meaning-producing factor in Meireles’ works, are confronted with a surreal situation created by the simple gesture of placing visual elements associated to a wild, dangerous animal in a landscape environment designed for human recreation and comfort. Founded on premises of political and social criticism, Cildo Meireles’ work developed during the period of the Brazilian military dictatorship, within an atmosphere of censorship and fear that characterized society from the mid-1960s onwards. Marked by a strong conceptual tendency, rooted in Brazilian neo-concretism of the late 1950s, as well as in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Piero Manzoni, Meireles’ oeuvre crosses interventions in the landscape and public space with drawing, sculpture and installation. His works frequently begin with the appropriation of objects drawn from everyday life, which are transformed to gain new meanings and propose a spatial involvement that offers viewers an expanded sensorial experience.
Mendes, Albuquerque
Catálogo, 1998- Catalogue, 1998
- Acrylic paint and collage on canvas, wooden frame
- 31 x 36.5 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2006
- Collage, combined with painting, is one of Albuquerque Mendes’ preferred media when experimenting with the meanings implicit in images. In this work the artist uses cut outs from a 1950s American crime magazine and from a 1980s brochure of Porto’s Marques e Soares department store. Juxtaposed and set against a desolate urban architecture, the figures depicted convey different messages from those that might have been originally intended: the policeman’s bonhomie is suspicious and the models in pyjamas resemble criminal suspects photographed by the authorities. A Portuguese commemorative stamp, glued to the lower part of the canvas, alludes to the transmission of ideas that the painting promotes between the artist, the author, and the viewer. The old frame, which was restored and painted by Mendes, encompasses the painting giving it an object like condition. Albuquerque Mendes has been producing work since the early 1970s. His work includes painting, performance, happenings and installation. Mendes explore themes from pop culture, folk tradition, religious forms and rituals as well as the social-historical conditions for the circulation, legitimizing and reception of the artwork. His painting, which often includes collage, reflects the appropriation and quotation of styles and iconography that marked art from the 1980s onwards. By appropriating the manner of renowned painters, such as Picasso, Arnulf Rainer, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, the paintings of Albuquerque Mendes exemplify the shunning of a personal style that defined much of the art produced at the time. Indeed, by applying a post-modernist logic of deconstruction with hints of neo-Dadaism and surrealism, his oeuvre showcases a substantial part of the history and art history of the twentieth century.
Mendieta, Ana
Ana Mendieta (Havana, Cuba, 1948 - Nova Iorque, EUA, 1985)Selected Filmworks, 1972 - 1982- Video (Betacam), b/w and colour, silent, PAL, 33’
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1999
- ‘Selected Filmworks’ presents a series of ritualistic and haunted films, in which the artist inscribes her own body in nature, using an iconography formed by blood, fire, water and other natural elements. A key example is the ‘Siluetas’ [Silhouettes] series, which is based on an exploration of history and memory through transformation of the earth into a sacred space, conceived via a physical and spiritual bond with the body.Ana Mendieta developed a deeply personal and experimental work, influenced by the artistic movements of her time and the historical and spiritual legacies of ancient cultures. Her performance works are informed by notions of personal identity founded on physical and spiritual connections between the body and the natural world, constantly using circumstances from her own life, including the experience of personal, cultural, and political displacement; the loss of connection with the individual and collective past; or ties with the spirituality of the earth as a critique of phallocentric cultural, social and religious ideologies.
Mendonça, Fátima
Parede de cobertores de lã, massas de bolo, bocas, 2004- Wall of wool blankets, cake batters and mouths, 2004
- Oil and oil pencil on canvas (triptych)
- 280 x 660 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2008
- Fátima Mendonça produces large format paintings and drawings that have a recognizable narrative content. Her paintings are inspired by situations related to childhood and female affirmation, in which a conflictual confrontation with the world is experienced through a mixture of seduction and guilt, challenge and nightmare. Her works constitute emotional diaries that mix confession with fiction. In 'Parede de cobertores de lã, massas de bolo e bocas' [Wall of wool blankets, cake batters and mouths], the pictorial surface strives to establish a balance between the materiality of the brushstroke and the obsessive repeatability of the motif. On close viewing, its visceral and undulating surface engulfs the viewer in a kind of suffocating enclosure, rendered audible by the painted invocation to ‘chiu’ (silence).
Merz, Mario
Mario Merz (Milão, Itália, 1925 - Turim, Itália, 2003)Salamino, 1966- Salami, 1966
- Fabric, neon light
- 254 x 90 x 70 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1998
- ‘Salamino’ (an Italian expression to designate a ‘small salami’) combines quotidian objects with neon tubes. A woollen blanket, rolled into the shape of a narrow pillow, hangs from the wall, pierced by a thin tube. By combining simple and ‘natural’ elements with an industrial structure producing light and energy, Merz attempted to bridge the organic and the inorganic. A trivial object from daily life undergoes a change in colour and shape thanks to the light emanating from it, the neon tube simultaneously destructive and transformative.
Molder, Jorge
Jorge Molder (Lisboa, Portugal, 1947)Série Zizi, 2013- Inkjet print (5 elements)
- 152 x 101 cm (each)
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2013
- The photographic series ‘Zizi’ (2013) by Jorge Molder (Lisbon, 1947) is displayed as five bands of colour against smooth, abstract and uniform surfaces. The apparent abstraction and smoothness of the resultant image, which traverses the five key moments of the light spectrum ? violet, blue, green, yellow and red ? is countered by the scratches that run across it and create textures that demonstrate the relationship between each photograph and the physical world. As is characteristic of the artist’s work, the title plays a fundamental role, offering clues for its interpretation. In this case the feline and feminine allusion of the name, which is suggestive and potentially seductive, contributes to make this work, in his words, a ‘small metaphor about the strangeness of its seduction’.
Jorge Molder (Lisboa, Portugal, 1947)Série "Call for Papers", 2013- Call for Paper series, 2013
- Inkjet print (2 elements)
- 152 x 101 cm (each)
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2013
- The capacity, or impossibility, of a photograph to record the traces of the outside world, even when it appears to be abstract, is confirmed in this series of works by Jorge Molder, which consists of several marks on a surface, in particular an apparent circular mark of a glass and a shoe print. The artist claims: ‘Almost any name could be used to describe this series of images. Traces, vestiges, indications, inaccuracies. One could also, interestingly, call these images manifestations or their opposite.’Renowned for producing his photographs in series, Molder confronts viewers with suspended narratives, without a beginning or end, in which the titles play a key evocative role ? almost like clues in a detective novel. His work reveals an almost obsessive interest in the practice of self-portraiture and self-representation.
Morris, Robert
Robert Morris (Kansas City, Missouri, EUA, 1931 - Kingston, New York, EUA, 2018)Sem título, 1969- UntitledVersion II in 19 parts, 1969
- Felt (16 elements)
- 257 x 257 x 50 cm 182,8 x 762 (verificar dimensões - no cat. circa estão diferentes 257 x 257 cm)
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2001
- Between 1967 and 1996, Robert Morris produced several works in which he used industrial felt as sculptural material. In these works, the artist has made geometrical and linear cuts and incisions on large pieces of this thick and heavy material, which he then piled up on the floor or suspended from the walls, letting the effect of gravity model their shapes in a process where the making of the work became indistinguishable from its final form. In this untitled piece the hooks from which the dark grey strips of felt hang are fixed to the wall at different heights allowing for a fluid, apparently casual structuring of the work, which becomes gradually denser and more complex as the thicker strips come closer together to finally reach the floor and invade the adjacent space. From the early 1980s onwards, the felt works started to have more predetermined forms and to include felt in two or more colours as they pointed towards sculptural tradition, such as the monument. In certain cases, the pieces also explored anatomical forms of the human body, reminding us of Morris’ 1983 comment in which he associates felt with skin, establishing a relationship with the body that would become a constant throughout his artistic trajectory. His so-called ‘Felt Pieces’ of the late 1960s and 1970s were mostly concerned with the behaviour of the material allowed to fall on the floor and with the variable, random forms that they took every time they were installed. This latter aspect would eventually lose relevance as collectors preferred to mount the pieces in the way they appeared in the first photographs, which led the artist to explain their installation process in detailed instruction procedures. Having started his activity as an artist in 1959, Morris abandoned his abstract expressionist influenced painting to begin a collaboration with the informal group of dancers of New York’s Judson Dance Theatre in 1962, which rejected the technical skills of classic ballet and body movements as expressions of emotions, to launch the foundations of contemporary dance through improvisation and emphasize the gestures used in executing everyday tasks. At the same time, Morris created objects marked with the imprints of his own body and developed sculptures in which repetition and seriality followed the minimalist research of forms and their organization in space. The direct antecedents of the ‘Felt Pieces’ are the ‘Rope Pieces’, a series of sculptures made in 1963-64, in which the dominant element is one or several ropes whose final shape depended on the force of gravity or on their random entanglement. However, it was only in the summer of 1967 that Morris resorted to industrial felt, during an artistic residency with Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer at Aspen Institute, Colorado. Back in his New York studio, Morris continued his experiments. He was interested in observing how gravity destroyed the formal linearity of his cuts and incisions as the work would open itself to the ‘disorder of "anti-form" ’, as art historian Rosalind Krauss put it. The ‘Felt Pieces’ were first shown in 1968 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. That same year, Morris published in Artforum one of his most important essays, ‘Anti Form’, illustrated with two of his ‘Felt Pieces’ and works by Jackson Pollock, among others. To his mind, the relationship between his ‘anti-form’ ideas and Pollock’s abstract expressionism was not, however, in the fact that the latter also spread his canvases on the floor to let paint drip onto random points of their surfaces without even touching them. Modernist art criticism had found in this way of painting a means of optimizing a purely visual painting stripped of subjectivity, while performance-pioneering artists, like Allan Kaprow, had valued the involvement of the whole body in the production of these works. However, for Morris this procedure had implications that would prove crucial to the formulation of his own ideas on process art, opening the way to an overcoming of the simple minimalist organization of forms in space, which to him seemed reductionist. In doing so, the gestures that manipulated the materials, and the behaviour that these displayed due to their own physical properties and to external actions and forces, were in themselves the artwork. In other words, the process was the work.Morris’ interest in the relationship between art, body and gesture results from the influence of abstract expressionism which characterizes his oeuvre (one of the most important examples of minimalism and post-minimalism), extending it into Land Art and processual art, in which the final object is valued for the process and the viewer led to experience and contact the work of art in novel ways.
Morton, Ree
Ree Morton (Ossining, EUA, 1936 - Chicago, EUA, 1977)Souvenir Piece, 1973- Acrylic paint on canvas mounted on wood, wood, acrylic paint, stones
- 244 x 460 x 278 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1998
- Ree Morton’s 'Souvenir Piece' is a memento of the summer of 1973, which the artist spent with her children near the coast of Newfoundland, in Canada. It brings together two sets of objects: pieces of wood, branches and stones, presumably collected by Morton during her holidays in Newfoundland, placed on a green painted ‘table’ supported by wooden poles; and six small paintings schematically depicting the elements placed on the table. The vertical position of the latter evokes the monolithic stones of ancient civilizations, which induces the reading of the installation as a model of an ancestral site for the celebration of sacred rituals. 'Souvenir Piece' thus crosses a personal and temporal experience of the artist and a universal and timeless morphology.Despite her short artistic trajectory, Ree Morton is considered a pioneer of American post-minimalism of the 1970s, with a particularly significative contribution to the history of installation.
Moth, Charlotte
Charlotte Moth (Carshalton, Reino Unido, 1978)Study for a 16mm film, 2011- Film 16 mm transferred to video, colour, silent, 11'28''. Ed. 1/5 + 1
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Work comissioned for the 2011 edition of the Sonae|Serralves Project. Acquisition 2012
- Charlotte Moth’s artistic practice has a subtle sculptural basis. Her photographs, films, objects, and installations act as a kind of scaffolding or performance of seeing, with the movement and stillness, and the figuring of time and space that this suggests.This film recalls modernist fantasies of pure colour and sinuous, abstract forms, as in the films of Hans Richter or Fernand Léger. Like these abstract cinema experiments of the 1920s, which worked with the elements of form, light and movement, Moth seeks to create a rich ‘visual symphony’.
Muntadas, Antoni
Acciones, 1972- Actions, 1972
- Video (Betacam), b/w, sound, PAL, 15’
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1999
- After abandoning painting in 1971, Antoni Muntadas developed several experiments on perception and recognition, which he called ‘sensorial experiments’. An approach to the sensorial forms and modes of the human body, ‘Acciones’ consists of a series of acts in which the artist explores the ‘minor senses’ (smell, touch and taste), decomposing trivial, fleeting gestures into topics that announce the actions in a false sequence and emphasize the search for pleasure and the exercise of sensibility.A pioneer of conceptual art, Antoni Muntadas constantly questioned the use of ideological circles of power in an oeuvre that addresses dichotomies between public and private spheres, subjectivity and objectivity, pattern and singularity, based on his research on the complexity of translation, the archetypes of the media landscape or the control structures and codes related to art world policies.
Intervenções: A propósito do público e do privado, 1992- Interventions: About the Public and the Private, 1992
- Metalic label and b/w photographs (21 elements)
- Dimensions variable
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2013
- 'Interventions: About the public and the private' is a project specifically conceived by Antoni Muntadas for the Serralves Villa in 1992. Composed of twenty-one brass elements, each containing the designation of the corresponding space at the Villa when it was inhabited and a photograph of the time (whenever one was found), the project represents one of the artist’s research platforms of choice.In the catalogue published by Serralves in 1992, Muntadas refers to his project as follows:(...)The project centres around observing and reflecting on the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ and their respective functions as well as on how a private place becomes public and vice-versa. (?)I find it easy to understand that the way the space is used and distributed in the ‘public’ often recreates the hierarchical organization of the ‘private’. ‘Public’ and ‘private’ share structures of organization, power and decision-making, which are apparently similar.The memory of the ‘private’, based on the identification of places or spaces through designation (texts/images) should constitute the starting point of the reflection on the use and consumption of both the ‘private’ and the ‘public’, as seen from a cultural viewpoint (once the political and social ones have been assumed).Born in Barcelona in 1942, Antoni Muntadas has been living in New York since 1971. His oeuvre is based on a critical reflection on society, politics and communication in the contemporary world. Examples of this reflection are the interventions in public and private spaces as well as the multidisciplinary research projects associated with an intense survey on the media and information channels and the way in which they are used to censor and promote ideas. Muntadas resorts to a variety of media and formats for the presentation of his works, amongst which photography, video, installation, printed materials and the Internet.
Musa Paradisiaca
Ecstasy and Eden, 2014- 16mm film transferred to HD, 4:3, color, sound, 8'10''. ED 1/3 + 2 AP
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2016
- ‘Ecstasy & Eden’ (2014) tells the story of a symbiotic moment that unifies the vegetal and mechanical world. The ‘Musa paradisíaca’ group classify this as a moment of energy that should allow man’s relationship with nature to be rethought. The soundtrack is entirely made up of incomprehensible sounds striving to create a mechanical language. Operating as an extension of the human body, this language is produced as an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives life to inert characters ? whether machines or plants.The ‘Musa paradisíaca’ project was created in 2010 by Eduardo Guerra (Lisbon, 1986) and Miguel Ferrão (Lisbon, 1986). Producing sculptures, performances and films, the project focuses on thinking and presenting alternative knowledge models, magical modes of thinking, consisting of myths, stories and vernacular belief systems.
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