Notes related to Portugal

The Reina Sofia Museum presents in the exhibition Opera to a Black Venus a necessary journey to the work of Grada Kilomba (Lisbon, Portugal, 1968), forming the most complete exhibition of her work to date in Spain. The Portuguese artist presents a complete discourse, mainly expressed through the different languages of movement, from the body to performance, but without leaving aside other narrative and artistic techniques with which she analytically presents a certain introspective look at the world of history.

Arte al Día takes a look at the curatorial selection that highlights works by Ibero-American galleries in the NEXT, RADAR and Main sections of Pinta Miami. The curatorial team for the 2024 edition of the fair is integrated by Irene Gelfman -global curator of Pinta and co-curator of FORO and Special Project-, Giuliana Vidarte -curator of NEXT and co-curator of FORO and Special Project- and Angelica Arbelaez -curator of RADAR.

Lisbon's MAAT hosts the exhibition Disco, a show with more than half a thousand works by Vivian Suter (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1949) with which the institution pays tribute to the pictorial production of the Swiss-Argentine artist and her particular exploration of the interaction with nature and the different techniques and possibilities applicable to painting.

The approach and review of the work that the multidisciplinary Portuguese-Brazilian artist Fernando Lemos (Lisbon, Portugal, 1926 - São Paulo, Brazil, 2019) made in the framework of his relationship with Japan is the reason for the exhibitions that two centers of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation dedicate to his figure. It is worth remembering here that both of them transit in the Japanese concept that stands as the central axis of the new headquarters of the Centro de Arte Moderno, recently inaugurated, and on which the dialogue between both curatorial proposals pivots.

Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, Belgium, 1959) began, at the end of the last century, to abandon the exclusivity of his body as the subject of the actions of his artistic proposal to begin to explore the possibility of finding and employing other subjects for this purpose. With this idea, the figure of children gained more and more importance in his production and became the sign of identity of a new stage for the new millennium.

The Kunsthalle Lissabon presents Quinze Anos de Amor na República dos Pangolins (Fifteen Years of Love at the Pangolin Republic), the third and last exhibition with which the institution celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. On this occasion, the center has invited curator Filipa Ramos, one of the Portuguese professionals with the most international projection, who has managed to put together a roster of artists with a strong Latin American presence, with Ad Minoliti, Amalia Pica, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Flora Rebollo, Gabriel Chaile, Haris Epaminonda, Irene Kopelman, Jonathas de Andrade, Luís Lázaro Matos, Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela, Mounira Al Solh, Nuno Sousa Vieira, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Sol Calero, Teresa Solar Abboud and Wilfredo Prieto.

Pedro Cabrita Reis (Lisbon, Portugal, 1956) celebrates his half century of artistic production in ATELIER, a complex and complete exhibition that covers what is, perhaps, one of the most relevant proposals of the last decades that has emerged from the Portuguese plastic arts. More than 1,500 works from his personal collection fill eight pavilions of Mitra, a space donated by the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa, located in Marvila, the same town where the artist lives and works.

Ernesto Neto (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1964) presents Nosso Barco Tambor Terra at Lisbon's Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), an impressive large-scale installation with which he evokes and stages the crossing of different cultures and the relationships between individuals from different continents.

A distribution through several of the Porto’s Serralves Foundation's venues are hosting until the end of May the first solo exhibition of Oscar Murillo (Zarzal, Colombia, 1986) in Portugal.

Greenhouse, the collective project by artist-curators Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges and Vânia Gala, will represent Portugal at the 60th International Venice Biennale.

MAAT presents Plug-in, a solo exhibition by Joana Vasconcelos, bringing together new works, some of the iconic pieces produced by the artist since 2000, and works from the EDP Foundation Art Collection, while establishing a dialogue between electricity heritage, technology, and visual arts.

Batalha Centro de Cinema, in Porto, presents the exhibition Sobrevoo by Jonathas de Andrade.

For the exhibition Reassembling Split Light at Sarasota Art Museum, Carlos Bunga will create a temporary cardboard structure in the 30-foot-high Koski Gallery located on the Museum’s third floor. Beginning and ending as a dialogue with the existing architecture, this installation will transform the gallery’s spatial configuration for the duration of the exhibition. By deploying light as his primary conceptual basis, just as James Turrell has done before him, Bunga explains that he will sculpt light, which cannot be touched, but only felt viscerally.

The Museum of Contemporary Art MAC/CCB in Lisbon, Portugal is looking for an Artistic Director for its new opening on October, 2023. Deadline to apply: August 31, 2023.

Four years after de donation of Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s entire archive to Casa da Architectura, the Portuguese Center for Architecture presented two simultaneous exhibtions, a book and a ten-month parallel program of activities around the artist’s principles, aesthetics and ethics.

AiR 351, the non-profit independent organization committed to promoting art residencies and public programs, presents three full grants for a visual arts residency program located in Cascais, Portugal.

On April 7, the Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga (Porto, 1976) presented his new installation Against the Extravagance of Desire at the Palacio de Cristal in the Retiro Park. Last Thursday, July 7, three months after its inauguration, Bunga returns to the Palace to undertake a performative intervention on his work.

Kunsthalle Lissabon presents Tactiles, the first solo show in Portugal by the Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero.