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Adnan, Etel
Etel Adnan (Beirute, Líbano, 1925)Five Senses for One Death, 1969- Ink and watercolor on paper
- 27.9 x 647.7 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2016
- A poet as well as a visual artist, Etel Adnan developed ‘leporellos’ - books of Japanese tradition that unfold like an accordion - since the 1960s, combining visual and verbal expressions through the joint inscription of Arabic poems and her own poetic texts and watercolours. Starting from this construction of the word, image and form, ‘Five Senses for One Death’ is inspired by one of her poems of the same title. Living in France and the United States since the 1950s, Etel Adnan has developed an oeuvre that crosses different cultures and artistic disciplines - namely poetry, painting, drawing, tapestry, ceramics and film - moving freely between the various strands of her written and visual work. Nature and war are guiding threads in her artistic work, which explores the political and personal dimensions of violence in a tumultuous world. By articulating her nomadic experience of displacement with the memory of familiar landscapes, she reflects on the traumatic realities of our time, but also the beauty and emotional and physical power of the natural world.
Almeida, Helena
Helena Almeida (Lisboa, Portugal, 1934 - Sintra, Portugal, 2018)Sem título, 1968- Untitled, 1968
- Acrylic paint on tulle
- 130 x 97 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1999
- This work precedes the shift in Helena Almeida’s work towards photography, and belongs to a set of works in which the artist began to undertake a critical investigation into the medium of painting, questioning its traditional media and its representational conditions. Her works from this period suggest a will to move away from pictorial space with an attention to the literal and physical conditions of painting, including the materiality of its supporting structures. In other works from the same period, the artist added elements to the painting, such as blinds and doors, that simultaneously allude to the idea of useless windows and function as a metaphor for the loss of the classical idea of painting as a ‘window unto the world’.Through her early painting, Almeida introduces the central concerns that define her artistic practice in a variety of media, in particular, an interest in breaking the confines of pictorial and narrative space, which has always played a fundamental role in her work.
Helena Almeida (Lisboa, Portugal, 1934 - Sintra, Portugal, 2018)Tela rosa para vestir, 1969- Pink Canvas for Wearing, 1969
- B/w photograph
- 58 x 48 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2000
- 'Tela rosa para vestir' [Pink Canvas for Wearing] is Helena Almeida’s first photographic work and is emblematic of her intention to question the boundaries of pictorial space. Here, the artist is shown wearing a pink canvas with sleeves and posing for the camera. In her words, ‘the canvas became an anthropomorphic figure’; yet rather than a self-portrait, the work becomes the representation of the artist’s body as a support for the presentation of painting. Such a critical reflection on the creation, presentation, and perception of painting, part of the work Helena Almeida developed between 1968 and 1969, defines her entire oeuvre: on the one hand, photography becomes a means to carry out a research into the nature of representation and pictorial space; on the other, her reflections on painting involve the body as a fundamental compositional element. As Almeida states, ‘My painting is my body, my work is my body.’The identification between body and work is a fundamental feature of Helena Almeida’s work, which questions traditional disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture or photography as devices to present and represent reality.
Helena Almeida (Lisboa, Portugal, 1934 - Sintra, Portugal, 2018)Pintura habitada, 1975- Inhabited Painting, 1975
- Acrylic paint on b/w photograph
- 46 x 50 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1999
- In the ‘Pinturas habitadas’ [Inhabited Paintings], painting is reduced to its core elements: lines and stains painted over a series of black and white photographs of Helena Almeida in the act of painting over her own reflection. The tone of blue used for the overpainting, obtained from the mixture of ultramarine and cobalt blue, is the most connoted with energy and space the artist was able to produce in order to give movement to gestures that would otherwise remain static. The space of these works is a screen that functions as the point of confluence of reality and representation, of painting itself and the act of painting. The mirror in which Helena Almeida appears duplicated divides the photographic plane into two spaces - an inside and an outside -, that create a third space - that of the image plane - that unites the two and inverts the relative positions of painter and viewer and subverts the status of their spaces. As Almeida stated in 1976, ‘by placing [her]self as the "artist" in the real space and the spectators in a virtual space, they exchange place with the support and become themselves imaginary space’. Unlike other ‘Pinturas habitadas’ in which the artist observes the movement of her hand leading the brush across the mirrored surface, in this specific work the gaze moves towards the place where the brush and her own reflected gaze intersect. It is this subtle way of bringing together the making of the painting and the recognition of herself that clarifies the artist’s 1978 statement about her strong effort ‘to try to open up a space, to find a way out no matter what’ and her having already succeeded to find ‘a way out through the tips of [her] fingers’.Helena Almeida’s work method has remained unchanged since she first started using photography in 1969. The artist begins by producing concise, clearly outlined preparatory drawings. Preliminary photographs and, since the 1980s, video recordings are in the subsequent stage used to rehearse gestures and framings. When the photographic image is captured, everything complies with the intention of, as Almeida says, ‘putting things in such a way that people can see them’. The photographs have always been taken by someone that knows her well, i.e. her husband, the architect Artur Rosa; the body appearing in them is always her own, the one that the artist recognizes as her best model; the space is always that of the same studio, now her own, where as a child she posed for her father, the sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida. For Almeida, what counts is the process and it was through this apparently traditional studio practice that the artist - who defines herself as a painter and to whom process is of the essence - developed her vision, as personal as it is radical, of the conceptual deconstruction of the language of painting that occurred in the international context of the late 1960s. Breaking with the rules of the discipline brought about by modernist painting was, in the Portuguese case, and for Almeida’s generation, part of the physical and psychological emancipation from the socio-cultural constraints imposed by the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933-1974). In Almeida’s work, it contributed to a questioning of the role traditionally attributed to women in art and a constant process of self-representation in which the artist is inseparable from the model and where author and subject become one. Almeida’s dissatisfaction with the two-dimensional pictorial plane manifested already in the second half of the 1960s, when she gave volume to coloured forms that burst out of the painting, and continued throughout the next decade in drawings with horsehair that prolong the lines drawn on paper beyond the boundaries of the support. In the artist’s words, her first photograph, depicting her dressed in canvas in a deliberate identification of her body to the body of painting, is an ‘anthropomorphic painting’. The urge to burst out of the plane of the image towards real space, which reveals her latent interest for Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases, became her most efficiently explored subject until the early 1980s and characterizes the several photographic series of ‘Pinturas habitadas’ that she would develop from the mid-1970s onwards.The identification between body and work is a fundamental feature of Helena Almeida’s work, which questions traditional disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture or photography as devices to present and represent reality.
Helena Almeida (Lisboa, Portugal, 1934 - Sintra, Portugal, 2018)Desenho habitado, 1977- Inhabited Drawing, 1977
- 31 x 48.5 cm (each)
- Coll. Portuguese State Secretariat of Culture, long-term loan to Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Deposit 1990
- One of the most renowned artists in Portugal, Helena Almeida uses her body as an extension of drawing, painting and photography. In her ‘Inhabited Drawings’, the artist resorts to horsehair as a tangible three-dimensional element that leaps from the photographic surface to engage in a dialogue with the viewer. Exploring the boundary between drawing and sculpture, and using the spatial qualities of material to disrupt the two-dimensionality of photography, Almeida reinforces the performative dimension of her work by using the body both as vehicle for the appearance of the work and as the work itself.The identification between body and work is a fundamental feature of Helena Almeida’s work, which questions traditional disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture or photography as devices to present and represent reality.
Helena Almeida (Lisboa, Portugal, 1934 - Sintra, Portugal, 2018)Desenho habitado, 1977- Inhabited Drawing, 1977
- 39.9 x 50.5 cm (each)
- Coll. Portuguese State Secretariat of Culture, long-term loan to Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Deposit 1990
- One of the most renowned artists in Portugal, Helena Almeida uses her body as an extension of drawing, painting and photography. In her ‘Inhabited Drawings’, the artist resorts to horsehair as a tangible three-dimensional element that leaps from the photographic surface to engage in a dialogue with the viewer. Exploring the boundary between drawing and sculpture, and using the spatial qualities of material to disrupt the two-dimensionality of photography, Almeida reinforces the performative dimension of her work by using the body both as vehicle for the appearance of the work and as the work itself.The identification between body and work is a fundamental feature of Helena Almeida’s work, which questions traditional disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture or photography as devices to present and represent reality.
Almeida, Sónia
Red Signal, 2013- Oil on marine plywood and LEDs
- 152.4 x 228.6 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2014
- Sónia Almeida’s (Lisbon, 1978) abstract paintings are the result of a set of actions through which the artist converts everyday visual experience into a series of ambiguous forms that defy the viewer’s perception. 'Red Signal' (2013) could be read as representing either a double helix, the symbol of infinitude, or a sign. Almeida’s paintings often derive from images and objects from her daily life. Once recorded in her sketchbooks, these elements are fragmented, stylized, reframed or overlapped, appearing as pictorial compositions that frustrate any attempt to organize them into intelligible sign systems. Almeida’s works are involved in a sophisticated game of approach and withdrawal based on painting’s two major historical traditions: its representational vocation and formal exploration.
Alves, Armando
Armando Alves (Estremoz, Portugal, 1935)Sem título, 1969- Untitled, 1969
- Synthetic paint on wood
- 100 x 108 x 28 cm
- Private collection, long-term loan to Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Deposit 1999
- From the late 1960s onwards, Armando Alves began to make monochromatic ‘objects-sculptures’, including this untitled work, influenced by Pop art. Dominated by chromatic vividness, compositional simplicity, effects of volume and light fluctuations, his works from this period present disruptive elements, such as crevices, creases, wrinkles, folds or twists, assimilating abstractionist and constructivist values and graphic design.
Armando Alves (Estremoz, Portugal, 1935)Sem título, 1973- Untitled, 1973
- Synthetic paint on wood
- 101 x 111 x 20 cm
- Coll. Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, long-term loan to Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto. Deposit 1990
- From the late 1960s onwards, Armando Alves began to make monochromatic ‘objects-sculptures’, including this untitled work, influenced by Pop art. Dominated by chromatic vividness, compositional simplicity, effects of volume and light fluctuations, his works from this period present disruptive elements, such as crevices, creases, wrinkles, folds or twists, assimilating abstractionist and constructivist values and graphic design.
Armando Alves (Estremoz, Portugal, 1935)Objecto, s.d.- Synthetic paint on wood
- 63 x 100.5 x 34 cm
- Private collection, long-term loan to Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Deposit 2002
- From the late 1960s onwards, Armando Alves began to make monochromatic ‘objects-sculptures’, including this untitled work, influenced by Pop art. Dominated by chromatic vividness, compositional simplicity, effects of volume and light fluctuations, his works from this period present disruptive elements, such as crevices, creases, wrinkles, folds or twists, assimilating abstractionist and constructivist values and graphic design.
Antunes, Leonor
"a spine wall supressed all draughts", 2008- 'a spine wall supressed all draughts', 2008
- Leather, rope (2 elements). Ed. 1/1
- 8 x 90 x 300 cm (each)
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2013
- ‘a spine wall suppressed all draughts’ belongs to a series of works Leonor Antunes conceived following her research on E-1027, a seaside villa in Southern France designed by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici and built between 1926 and 1929. In this series of works, the artist has produced duplicates of each of her sculptures, allowing the same object to be perceived in different ways when placed in different spatial arrangements. The title of the work is an excerpt of the text ‘Eclecticism to Doubt’, a dialogue between Gray and Badovici about the Villa.The sculpture is composed of two rolls of black leather that replicate a wave-shaped Fibreglass wall from the lower floor of the villa. The use of the malleable material confers to the artist’s replica a flexibility that is only illusory in the original. Leonor Antunes explores the relationships between sculpture, architecture, design and the decorative arts. A keen researcher of some of the most iconic buildings of the twentieth century, the artist appropriates formal elements gathered in the course of her research, giving them new contexts to question our way of looking at modernity and its critical reception. Size, scale and proportion and the pliable characteristics of materials, such as leather, rubber and various metals, are crucial elements in Antunes’ work, through which she creates spaces of tension between seriality and manufacture. The constant references to Gray, Carvalho and Mollino, combined with forms, techniques and materials alluding to the work of artists such as Eva Hesse and Carol Rama, reveal her belief that what is left to the artist is the task of recombining cultural materials.
"avoiding the mistral wind", 2008- 'avoiding the mistral wind', 2008
- Wood, leather (3 elements). Ed. 1/1
- Dimensions variable
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2013
- ‘avoiding the mistral wind’ belongs to a series of works Leonor Antunes conceived in the context of her on-going research on key figures of modernist architecture, such as Eileen Gray, Carlo Mollino, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Flávio de Carvalho, Jean Prouvé and Buckminster Fuller. The sculpture is made of three folding screens in leather and wood that divide the exhibition space into domestically scaled compartments, creating a relation between the body, display, and domestic space. The title refers to a passage from a dialogue between Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici about the Villa E-1027, a seaside villa in Southern France they both designed and that was built between 1926 and 1929. It leads us to see the work as a set of rotated brise-soleils, permanent sun-shading structures installed in building façades to block and redirect the light and the wind, introduced by Le Corbusier and interpreted by many different modernist architects. The title also alludes to the movable panels or dividing partitions for which Gray was famous.A keen investigator of twentieth century modernist architecture, Leonor Antunes explores the relationships between sculpture, architecture, design and the decorative arts. Size, scale and proportion and the pliable characteristics of materials, such as leather, rubber and various metals, are crucial elements in Antunes’ work, through which she creates spaces of tension between seriality and manufacture. The constant references to Gray, Carvalho and Mollino, combined with forms, techniques and materials alluding to the work of artists such as Eva Hesse and Carol Rama, reveal her belief that what is left to the artist is the task of recombining cultural materials.
"paving stones across the garden", 2008- 'paving stones across the garden', 2008
- Leather (2 elements). Ed. 2 + 1 A.P.
- Dimensions variable
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2013
- ‘paving stones across the garden’ belongs to a series of works Leonor Antunes conceived following her research on E-1027, a seaside villa in Southern France designed by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici and built between 1926 and 1929. The works in this series are made up of identical elements allowing different perspectives when placed in different spatial situations. The titles are drawn from ‘Eclecticism to Doubt’, a dialogue between Gray and Badovici about the Villa.Leonor Antunes appropriated the design by Gray for a modular tile structure for the villa’s garden, doubling its dimensions. Made out of leather, an easily mouldable material, the two elements of paving stones are installed in a way deliberately resembling the way Eva Hesse used to install her own works: one on the floor and the other mounted on both the wall and the floor, creating an angle and the space between the two.
Artigas, 2014- Brass, hemp rope
- 340 x 170 x 5 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2014
- 'Artigas' (2014) was inspired by a visit made by Leonor Antunes (Lisbon, 1972) to a house designed in 1949 by the Brazilian architect João Vilanova Artigas (1915-1985) for his family in São Paulo. Conceived as a suspended, finely latticed curtain, this gridded organization is transformed into a net like veil. The method of suspension using a quadrilateral configuration with a hemp rope suggests a kind of masculine support for the sculpture’s visually diaphanous screen. The sculptural and tactile dimensions of the brass net and its rope are dependent on simple manual actions such as stretching, folding, pulling and tying, in a poetic subversion of rational structure.
Araújo, Vasco
Vasco Araújo (Lisboa, Portugal, 1975)O Jardim, 2005- Garden, 2005
- Video (DVCam, format 16:9), colour, sound, 9’44’’. Ed. 3/5 + 2 A.P.
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2007
- 'O Jardim' [Garden] draws on excerpts from two canonical works of Classical Antiquity: Homer´s 'Odyssey' and 'Iliad'. Two women and three men - represented by bronze African sculptures in close-up shots - ‘talk’ about the condition of the foreigner, in an exchange that is surprisingly contemporary. These sculptures are in Lisbon’s Colonial Garden (today Tropical Garden), a place integrated into the 1940 Exhibition of The Portuguese World. As a recreation of the environment and landscapes of the Portuguese colonies, this garden was a miniature representation of the Portuguese colonial empire from the point of view of the propaganda and ideology of the Fascist State.Marked by a strong scenic character, Vasco Araújo’s work is inhabited by a universe of literary, historical and cultural references, from opera to classical mythology. The questioning of our relationship with (sexual, racial) difference and a critical review of the Portuguese colonial history are also among its distinctive features.
Areal, António
António Areal (Porto, Portugal, 1934 - Lisboa, Portugal, 1978)XVI Desenhos, 1968- XVI Drawings, 1968
- Indian ink and watercolour on paper (16 elements). Ed. 1/22
- 37.5 x 28.5 cm (each)
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2011
- The keen observation of abstract forms in 'XVI Desenhos' [XVI Drawings] reveals a montage of fragments of objects such as windows, coffins and tree profiles. The simple, uniform, Pop-inspired colours are used to eliminate the sentimental and literary quality that António Areal found in the textures and chromatic gradations of abstract informal painting. In the inside back cover that binds these drawings a typewritten inscription states that the twenty-two copies are ‘rigorously identical’, i.e. they are at the same time perfect copies of one another and ‘unique works’. In doing so, Areal questions the system of attribution of value to art and warns that these sixteen drawings constitute a whole that should not be dismantled.
Artschwager, Richard
Richard Artschwager (Washington DC, EUA, 1923 - Albany, EUA, 2013)Locations, 1969- Formica on wood, wood, glass, mirror, Plexiglas, rubberized horse hair with formica acid (6 elements). Ed. 39/90
- Dimensions variable
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1998
- The work 'Locations' is made of five small objects of variable dimensions and ovular shape. Four of them are mounted on the wall and the fifth is suspended from the ceiling. The title, which seems to suggest that these locations are but one amongst many possibilities, underscores the crucial role of the context in the definition of the artwork, a status to which any object may aspire ? even if trivial looking and mass produced ?, as Artschwager demonstrated by turning this banal ovular shape into his trademark.Richard Artschwager, who is considered one of the most singular names in post-war American art, started his professional career in the 1950s by working as a furniture designer and maker. This activity would profoundly mark the artistic work that he started developing in the following decade: by integrating artificial, industrially manufactured materials his sculptures often evoke functional objects.Artschwager’s oeuvre is the result of a confluence of different aesthetics, such as minimalism, conceptualism or pop art, through which the artist explores his interest in everyday forms and the distinction between art and design, challenging these disciplines through perception and illusion.
Richard Artschwager (Washington DC, EUA, 1923 - Albany, EUA, 2013)BLP, 1969- Painted steel
- 115 x 37.5 x 37.5 cm
- Coll. Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 1999
- Richard Artschwager coined the word ‘blp’ to designate his oval abstract creations. These works, made in different scales, volumes and materials, are placed at different locales, from galleries to subway stations. They are conceived as marks that punctuate space and interrupt it, drawing attention to their surroundings, which could otherwise go unnoticed to the distracted eye.
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