This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Lourdes Castro, Manuel Zimbro: Quinta do Monte 1983-1988, held at Fundação Carmona e Costa, curated by Paulo Pires do Vale, between 1 October and 9 November 2019, and complements the Publication of the artist book Main Entrance - Quinta do Monte 1983-1988, facsimile based on the Quinta do Monte Album, by Lourdes Castro and Manuel Zimbro.

In 1983, Lourdes Castro and Manuel Zimbro left Paris and returned to Portugal, to the island of Madeira, where the artist was born. On the 21st of April of that year, they moved to Quinta do Monte, an early 19th century mansion loaned by the Rocha Machado family, to live there while they looked for the place where they would build their house.

In this exhibition, we focus on the five years spent on that Quinta, where Lourdes Castro makes or projects her latest works, paying attention to the shadows of the garden and its flowers, the house and its objects. Our starting point was the Quinta do Monte Album, never exhibited, where Lourdes Castro manifests the practice of recurring collection in many of her artist books, mixing her life, during her stay on that Quinta, with that of the previous inhabitants, crossing references and collecting evidence. […]

On May 23, 1988, Lourdes Castro and Manuel Zimbro moved into the house they built in Caniço. There they continued their story, started a new Album.

[Paulo Pires do Vale]

The lightness of the summers of the past tinges them with shades of nostalgia. A vague tranquility invades us when looking at the photos of the summer when we had breakfast with Lourdes Castro and Manuel Zimbro at Quinta do Monte, sitting around the table set in the middle of a meadow surrounded by tall trees. We felt that that moment was right, that everything in the world was connected, that even the cake on the table evoked the cakes painted by old masters in Florentine or Venetian paintings.

[Almeida Faria]