Itinerant Exhibitions

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

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.

 

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

Schedule:

Que sais-je?’ presents more than thirty books and editions produced between the 1960s and today by twenty four artists. It draws its title from the famous French pocket encyclopedia with the same name initiated in 1941 and designed to introduce to the general public a wide range of subjects from philosophy to pedagogy.

The exhibition considers how classic forms to collect and transmit knowledge, such as atlases, dictionaries and encyclopedias, have been used by artists since the early avant-gardes of the twentieth century. At a time when school and academic models are increasingly used by artists and curators, and when the eminently pedagogical forms of ateliers, seminars and conferences hold an important place in countless exhibitions, ‘Que sais-je?’ enables us to grasp the way in which these editions have always presented alternative visions of what ‘transmitting knowledge’ might mean.

‘Que sais-je?’ in Museu Nogueira da Silva 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

Manuel Rosa (Beja, 1953), graduated from the Lisbon School of Fine Arts (ESBAL) in 1978. He pertains to the generation of artists who radically transformed the world of stone sculpture in Portugal in the 1980s. During his career Rosa has primarily worked with limestone to produce his sculptures. Initially dedicated to figurative art, his works were subsequently immediately recognisable by their absolute purification, including elliptic and conical forms, and decidedly modern execution processes, such as the use of an electric saw, sectioning and superimposition of various parts and a rudimentary, almost schematic, modelling of the surfaces that eliminated any naturalistic intent.

In these two sculptures, both produced in 1987, we recognise the archetypes of canoes. A common characteristic of Manuel Rosa’s sculptures is his attention to the essential, while calling to mind easily recognizable archetypes - such as the human figure, house, boat - and attempting, through them, to attain the pure Platonic form.

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

This October, as a result of the partnership established between the Serralves Foundation and the Municipality of Vila Nova de Famalicão, the Casa do Território, within the framework of its programming, will host the exhibition, "My Home is Your Home, Images of Domestic and Urban Life in the Serralves Collection”.

Many artists have used the home as a subject and pretext for their work. The artists and works included in this exhibition focus on domestic and daily life, proposing different interpretations of the meaning of the home. Regardless of the approach adopted, the home always seems to involve a subtle game between the private and public spheres.

In the run-up to the exhibition, the sculpture Untitled, 1990, by José Pedro Croft, will be on display from June 4 onwards, in the garden of the Casa do Território.

In this work, Croft uses a traditional technique of sculpture - modelling in plaster, followed by casting in bronze - to produce a sculpture that refers to the domestic space and day-to-day experiences. In this case, a segment of a cone evokes a bowl. The forms of the sculpture, as well as white paint covering the bronze, establish a bridge between the simplicity of domestic objects and the grandiloquence of geometric solids, making it impossible to use the objects because of their weight.

The exhibition will present works by: Filipa César, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Gil Heitor Cortesão, José Pedro Croft, Ângela Ferreira, Fernanda Fragateiro, Gordon Matta-Clark, Juan Muñoz, Bruce Nauman, Luís Palma, Martha Rosler, Ana Vieira.

João Charters d’ Almeida, Manuel Baptista, Eduardo Batarda, Joaquim Bravo, Pedro Calapez, António Campos Rosado, Alberto Carneiro, Luís Noronha da Costa, José Pedro Croft, José de Guimarães, Fernando Lanhas, Álvaro Lapa, Jorge Martins, Júlio Pomar, Paula Rego, Joaquim Rodrigo, Manuel Rosa, Julião Sarmento, António Sena, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Nikias Skapinakis, Ângelo de Sousa, João Vieira

This exhibition presents a selection of works belonging to the Secretary of State for Culture (SEC) that have been in deposit at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art since the creation of the Serralves Foundation. The works chosen demonstrate the importance of painting and sculpture between the 1960s and 1980s in renewing artistic languages in Portugal and express the dialogues and formal confluences that Portuguese artists were able to establish both with each other and the international scene in the post-war period.

The SEC Collection was one of the first deposits to become part of the Serralves Collection highlighting a selection of Portuguese artists that served as a guideline for the inclusion of future acquisitions and creating foundations to consolidate the contemporary context chronologically, as well as its various themes. 

‘Body, Abstraction and Language in Portuguese Art’ in Museu de Arte Contemporânea Nadir Afonso 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.

MIGUEL PALMA
Born 1964, Lisbon

Device, 1993

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


Venue:
Altice Fórum Braga
Mon-Fri: 9 a.m.-6 p.m.
Sát: 9 a.m.-5 p.m

Ângelo de Sousa (Lourenço Marques, Mozambique, 1938—2011, Porto) is one of the most influential figures in the Portuguese art world of the second half of the twentieth century and is one of the artists with the greatest number of works in the Serralves Collection. These works span the period between 1960 and 2010, and cover all artistic media used throughout his prolific career: drawing, painting, film, sculpture, installation and photography.

‘Ângelo de Sousa: Almost Everything I am Capable Of’ combines a considerable part of these works — including almost all his drawings, paintings and sculptures — and aims to emphasize the importance of the interaction between these disciplines for the evolution of his artistic work. Including around 35 works from various periods of his career, this exhibition will make a definitive contribution to combating the prevailing image that he was primarily a painter. It shows that his sculptures and drawings are also fundamental facets of his work, in which the experimentalist spirit is particularly striking.  

His works are apparently simple — the artist once said that he tried to achieve ‘the maximum effect with the minimum resources, the maximum effectiveness with the minimum effort, and the maximum presence with the minimum screaming’. His drawings, paintings and sculptures do not illustrate concepts, they never begin with ideas, but rather his desire to make and think with his hands. The exhibition underlines the artist’s desire to work with simple elements, and presents his earliest works, still figurative but already revealing the simplified approach that was to characterize his practice, side by side with abstract-geometric exercises — in particular drawings, paintings and sculptures — that established Ângelo de Sousa as one of the utmost explorers of colour and light.

The Estate of Ângelo de Sousa  has kindly contributed to this exhibition with the loan of two works that complete the installation Uma escultura, originally presented in 1972 at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes in Lisbon, and a short film made by the artist and dating from the same year that documents the installation.

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

Since its creation in the late 1980s, the Serralves collection has offered a broad and considered selection of artworks from Portugal and abroad, from the mid-1960s to the present day. It is constantly being refreshed, thereby guaranteeing a prospective look towards works currently being produced.

A programme of touring exhibitions throughout the country has enabled different audiences to discover works from the collection in venues that are not necessarily created to host contemporary art exhibitions. These exhibitions thereby constitute a generous possibility to expand the opportunities for reformulating the meanings of art production, open to confrontation between the works and the new and surprising contexts.

In ‘The Conspiracy of Forms’ the works from the Serralves collection on display engage with the idea of revelation, and require the viewer’s active engagement. The works foster confrontation, enabling us to re-evaluate our position before the works and thereby allowing us to reassess our position in the world. The exhibition seeks to delocalize the expectation of our perception before objects and gestures and established categories of right or wrong, of the visible, invisible, predictable or unpredictable. Artists are free to confront us with the dismantling of the world. Apparently insignificant gestures sometimes conceal an immensity of traumas, just as behind immense blackness there may be nothing but the mere end of a quiet day.

For this reason, images deceive, works reveal.

Curator: Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro 

Production: Serralves Foundation — Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto 

DANH VÕ (Born in 1975, Bà Ria, Vietnam)

Copper| Coll. Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Acquired 2013

Notions of time, the perception of its passage and how it relates to the awareness of the finite nature of human existence are themes recurrently explored by various contemporary artists. This exhibition presents five highly personal views of temporality, based on circularity and unrelated to chronology and succession. We are made aware of time passing through actions that are repetitive (Bruce Nauman), or circular and apparently meaningless (Ana Jotta); by facing up to the end of life (Thomas Schütte); by building bridges between contemporaneity and distant references to reveal the essential impulse cutting across times and tendencies in the origin of artistic practice (Rui Chafes); or setting up the work of art as an unclassifiable object (between art and design, between painting and sculpture) and impossible to date (Gerardo Burmester).

Works by these five artists are currently on view in the exhibition Zéro de Conduite at the Serralves Museum. In addition to complementing the Serralves programme, perhaps giving MMIPO visitors their first insight into the Serralves Foundation’s Collection, Round and Round shows aspects of these artists that are not explored in Zéro de Conduite, significantly opening up readings of Gerardo Burmester, Rui Chafes, Ana Jotta, Bruce Nauman and Thomas Schütte’s artistic practices. 

"Anda a roda" is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with MMIPO, curated by Ricardo Nicolau, curator of the Museum, and coordinated by Isabel Braga. 

The exhibition 'Music and Words: Works from the Serralves Collection' offers an itinerary through the Serralves Collection, encompassing works that, although created in different historic and geographic contexts, all incorporate the sound experience in their visual and conceptual discourses. 

 

Ranging from the aesthetic vision of the event, to the artist’s role as a performer, passing through experimental sound practices, the exhibition draws closer to the sound experience, from the perspective of its social dimension in the contemporary world. The materiality of sound, the power of the word as a sound tool, the sense of catharsis associated with musical elements and allusions to the frenetic aesthetics of music videos, delimit an itinerary through different proposals that are transversally linked to sound, music, and the word.

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

Rui Aguiar, Joaquim Bravo, Gerardo Burmester, José Pedro Croft, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Rui Chafes, Juan Muñoz, Rui Sanches

‘The Return of the Object’ presents a selection of works by eight artists who launched their careers during the 1980s. They testify a general reaction to the predominance of minimal and conceptual art in the previous decades. This reaction took the form of a notable return to painting and sculpture and the use of traditional materials, namely iron, bronze and wood. This decade also witnessed a revival of classical themes related to the history of art, a reappearance of figurative and metaphoric imagery together with poetic or evocative titles, and an association with applied arts and popular culture. 

This diversity is connected to the early stages of globalization, placing very different cultures in contact and fostering their mutual influence. This exhibition is an opportunity to look anew at the art of this decade that represented the end of isolationism that the dictatorship had inculcated in Portugal, leading to an increasing synchronism with the international art world.

‘The Return of the Object’ in Edifício Villa Moraes 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. 

Exhibition organized by Fundação de Serralves ? Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. 

Pedro Barateiro

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.

Col. Coll.Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Aquisição Acquisition em 2015 

‘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.

This initiative is the result of a partnership between the Serralves Foundation and the Infraestruturas of Portugal/ Estação de São Bento. 

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

"Music and Words: Works from the Serralves Collection" is an exhibition that presents a tour through the Serralves Collection, via works that have been created in different historical and geographic contexts, but which are interrelated, by incorporating the sound experience into their visual and conceptual discourse.

From the aesthetic vision of the event, to the role of the artist as a performer, and also encompassing experimental sound practices, this exhibition proposes an approach to the sound experience from its social dimension in the contemporary context. This exhibition creates an itinerary with different proposals, more or less transversely linked, to sound, music and the word based on the materiality of sound, the power of the word as a sound tool, the catharsis around musical elements and allusions to the frenetic aesthetics of the music video.

Works by Dara Birnbaum, Luís Paulo Costa, Luisa Cunha, Dan Graham, Ricardo Jacinto, Tony Oursler, Rui Toscano, Pedro Tudela.

Production: Serralves Foundation - Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto