Subscribe Newsletter |

Versão Portuguesa

Museum The CollectionA closer look

A closer look

A
seta
B
seta
C
seta
D
seta
E
seta
F
seta
G
seta
H
seta
I
seta
J
seta
K
seta
L
seta
M
seta
N
seta
O
seta
P
seta
Q
seta
R
seta
S
seta
T
seta
V
seta
W
seta
Y
seta
Z
seta

Pacheco, Bruno

Paik, Nam June

Palma, Miguel

Palolo, António

Pape, Lygia

Ttéia 1B (redonda), 1976 - 2000

Lygia Pape (Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 1927 - Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 2004)

Ttéia 1B (redonda), 1976 - 2000

Ttéia 1B (round), 1976 - 2000
Golden thread, copper studs
445 x 500 x 500 cm
Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2006
Lygia Pape was one of the most significant artists of post-war Brazil, with a prolific artistic career that spanned more than five decades. Working in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, poetry, drawing, installation, film and performance, she was a key figure in the development of Brazilian art from the 1950s until her death in 2004. As the artist stated, art was a ‘way of understanding the world’, of exploring formal experimentation as well as complex ideas about perception, space and sensation.Pape’s early work was influenced by the geometric abstract art of the early twentieth century, particularly in the use of formal devices and compositions structured by chromatic planes and geometrical shapes. Her initial woodcuts, paintings and constructions were produced during a period of rapid industrialization in Brazil, marked by social change, relative economic prosperity and the construction of a new capital, Brasília. As part of the Grupo Frente, an artistic vanguard started in 1953, Pape’s work confronted the legacy of this modernist art directly, in particular the painting of Mondrian and Malevich, and the concrete art of Theo van Doesburg and Max Bill. As a result of the supposed rigidity and dangerously rationalist extreme of such art, however, Pape, along with artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, published the ‘Manifesto neoconcreto’ in the Jornal do Brasil newspaper in 1959. In place of the formalist and supposedly objective character of concrete art, the neo-concrete artists sought to emphasize a sensorial, political and subjective dimension to art making, moving beyond formalist concerns. Their new experimental, immersive and participatory forms of art would, as artist and researcher Regina Célia Pinto said, ‘take art down from its pedestal and include it in life’, integrating the viewer in the artwork. For Pape, this meant combining formal rigour with a sense of social and architectural space, as well as the activation of the body through sensorial experimentation. Shifting away from object-based artistic practices and toward an attention to this spatial and affective dimension, Pape’s work grew both more experimental and socially engaged within the political repression in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s.Pape’s Ttéias, first conceived in the 1970s, perhaps most directly encapsulate her artistic concerns. The web, either physically or metaphorically, appears throughout much of her work, connoting a sense of tensile forms that occupy discreet spaces while maintaining their geometry, precarious yet strong. Their origin lay as much in spider webs - in the sense of accumulated time and undisturbed space, as the artist noted - as in the nature of the urban environment: driving through the city, Pape felt ‘as though I were a kind of spider, weaving webs’. In 'Ttéia 1B (redonda)' [round], the formal logic of constructivism is distilled into the play of light. The work was conceived specifically for the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. Like all the Ttéias, its shape and densities is carefully rendered in drawings. The work is meticulously constructed with golden metallic thread, the base of each shape consisting of a set of copper studs set in circular form, with thread wrapped around them to create the cylindrical volume. At once barely imperceptible and monumental, the subtle optical effects are achieved by the reflection of light on these lines in space. 'Ttéia 1B (redonda)' extends Pape’s use of line to define, and collapse, two and three-dimensional space, while also reflecting the evolution of the overlapping visual planes in her early work. Light functions here as both material and structure, with each viewer’s position comprising a different experience. As the artist wrote, ‘the artwork does not exist as a finished and resolved object, but as something that is always present, permanent within people.’ 'Ttéia 1B (redonda)' is thus a culmination of a decades-long concern with integrating the space of the art work with real space, the geometrical dimension of abstract art here transformed into a dance of shimmering light.

Penalva, João

Pereira, Fernando José

Pica, Amalia

A n B n C (line), 2013

Amalia Pica (Neuquén, Argentina, 1978)

A n B n C (line), 2013

72 colored acrylic shapes and occasional performance
Dimensions variable
Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2013
‘A n B n C (Line)’ (2013), or ‘A intersects B intersects C’, is comprised of a series of geometric shapes cut from coloured Perspex, arranged on the wall like a musical score or a sentence. This apparently fixed syntax is, in fact, performative: the shapes are to be activated and arranged by a group of performers, who form a variety of compositional arrangements in space in front of an audience. The artist does not determine or choreograph these possible compositions beforehand, but only sets one basic condition for them: that at any one time, only one shape can be apart from the others. Each overlay or combination of colour, opacity and form, becomes an image only for a passing moment, before once again changing shape, recombining with another. This condition is reflected in the very title of the work itself, which derives from a basic principle of set theory, the intersection of two sets (i.e. centre of a Venn diagram), or the set that contains all elements of A that also belong to B and so on.In her installations, drawings, videos and performances, Pica confronts the gaps and slippages of communication. The various forms that communicate exchange might take - from semaphore flags, to slips of the tongue ? are central to her work. Born during Argentina’s dictatorship and so-called ‘Dirty War’ - a seven-year campaign against suspected dissidents and subversives -, Pica has also long been interested in the relationship between form and politics. For example, during the period of dictatorship in Argentina in the 1970s, modern mathematics, including Venn diagrams, were banned from school programs. The Venn diagram, in this sense, can be seen to represent forms of compromise or collaboration, a geometric representation of collectivity and gathering, brought to life in ‘A n B n C (Line)’ by bodies moving in space. For Pica, art directly confronts the process of translating an idea into a physical form, either in fixing otherwise fleeting moments of shared experience, or in creating metaphors for the nature of communication itself.

Pimentão, Diogo

Pinheiro, Jorge

Pinheiro, António Costa

Pistoletto, Michelangelo

Polke, Sigmar

Pomar, Vítor

Posenenske, Charlotte

Support this project.
Become a member.

Rua D. João de Castro, 210
4150-417 Porto Portugal

41º9'35.40"N
8º39'35.35"W

226156500

serralves@serralves.pt

Serralves

© 2020 -