Tag Archives: lisboa

Antoni Muntadas

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon

05.05 – 18.09.2023

 

In the year that marks the 40th anniversary of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Modern Art Centre (Centro de Arte Moderna – CAM), Histórias de uma Coleção [Histories of a Collection] is an opportunity to revisit some of the most significant works from the CAM Collection, acquired by the Gulbenkian Foundation since the late 1950s, and to get to know its lesser-known or previously unseen works.

 

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation acquired its first works of modern art in the late 1950s, with the intention of including them in temporary travelling exhibitions organised by the institution. It also purchased works from its grant holders, in the context of the support for artists set up immediately after its creation, in 1956. The Modern Art Centre Collection thus began to take shape, now boasting around twelve thousand works.

 

During the 1960s, the first groups of works purchased for the Collection included works by key figures in the national and international art scene, such as Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, José de Almada Negreiros and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. The British artworks were mostly acquired between 1960 and 1965, featuring major players such as David Hockney and Bridget Riley.

 

The desire to build a space to house this burgeoning collection of modern art, which now included a significant number of national and international artists, was made official in 1979. The Modern Art Centre opened on 20 July 1983 with an innovative programme making up for the lack of a museum in Portugal dedicated to the promotion of 20th-century art.

 

The Collection grew exponentially from then on, leading to the purchase of works by a diverse range of artists in a plethora of media and supports. Built up over more than 60 years, the CAM Collection is the result of various encounters, intimacies, rifts, aesthetic relationships and contrasting artistic languages.

 

With an innovative presentation, Histórias de uma Coleção aims to bring together a wide spectrum of works covering different eras, geographies and artistic dynamics, underpinned by new narratives and interpretations. Key moments that explore the constitution of the CAM Collection will be highlighted, accompanied by a catalogue, with essays by the exhibition curators, among others, as well as a parallel programme to the exhibition that will seek to open space for reflection on what the CAM Collection represents and on models of collecting, allowing the public to comes closer to the works in the Collection and the stories they have to tell.

 

Curators
Ana Vasconcelos
Leonor Nazaré
Patrícia Rosas
Rita Fabiana

 

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Cabrita

Lisbon, 1956

Lives and works in Lisbon

 

Cabrita’s complex work can be characterized by an idiosyncratic philosophical and poetical discourse embracing a great variety of means: painting, photography, drawing, and sculptures composed of industrial materials and found objects.

 

His work has steadily received international acknowledgement, thus becoming crucial and decisive for the understanding of sculpture from the mid-1980’s onwards. By using simple materials that are submitted to constructive processes, Cabrita recycles almost anonymous reminiscences of primordial gestures and actions repeated in everyday life. Centered in questions relative to space and memory, his works gain a suggestive power of association which reach a metaphorical dimension by going beyond the visual.

 

The complex theoretical and formal diversity of the work of Cabrita proceeds from an anthropological reflection, which is contrary to the reductionism of sociological discourse. In fact, it is on silences and indagations that the work of Cabrita is based and built on.

Objects on the New Landscape Demanding of the Eye (part 3)

We are pleased to present Julião Sarmento’s fourth exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats, titled Objects on the New Landscape Demanding of the Eye (part 3), in which we will show his recent work, with installation, sculpture and painting.

 

The title of the exhibition recalls that of the first exhibition held at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957, which included paintings by various artists and in which the installation and assemblage pioneer, Edward Kienholz, participated.

 

In the exhibition, the installation Crash Dummy, 2016, and the sculpture Broken Alice, 2014, coexist with a series of paintings that show triangular shapes, delicately drawn, based on the fundamental principles of fractal geometry, and other works inspired by the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen of Degas. This diversity of supports and techniques present in the exhibition is characteristic of the artistic practice of Julião Sarmento and, on this occasion, stands out for the combination of materials that could be defined as poor with materials subject to advanced technological processes.

 

Julião Sarmento produces a work that adopts multiple forms with drawings, paintings, sculptures, performances and videos that speak of the artifices of seduction and the mechanisms of desire. From its beginnings, in the middle of the seventies, the work of Julião Sarmento has been characterized by its archival character. Thus, in his works, they can appear feminine silhouettes, architectural plans, literary fragments and objects.

 

Often, these coded iconographies explicitly present us with the signs needed to identify to the source of his imagery and its meanings. This constant oscillation between appearance and reality, fiction and documentation, invention and fact with which Sarmento confronts us is not at all a gratuitous game. The assemblages fashioned by the artist play on this dialectic of superficial interpretation, where many elements are perfectly identifiable, even banal or anodyne, and deeper interpretation that drives us to seek correspondences, links and relations without realizing that the very fact of carrying out this search is itself the meaning we are supposed to discover.

Galerias Municipais, Lisboa

Inauguração 11.11.2017 – 17h

12.11.2017 – 7.1.2018

 

A exposição apresenta uma seleção de cerca de 40 artistas e mais de 80 obras pertencentes a coleções públicas e privadas em Portugal, e tem como objetivo identificar alguns nexos históricos que ainda passam à margem das narrativas institucionalizadas sobre a produção artística da América Latina.

 

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