JORGE PINHEIRO: D'après Fibonacci and the world out there
from 15 SEP 2017 to 07 JAN 2018
A project by Cabrita Reis with Jorge Pinheiro
‘D'après Fibonacci and the world out there’ brings together paintings, drawings and sculptures by the influential Portuguese artist Jorge Pinheiro (Coimbra, 1931). The exhibition is based on an idea by Cabrita Reis, on the invitation of Suzanne Cotter, director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, with an exhibition design conceived by the Pritzker Prize winning architect, Eduardo Souto Moura, and continues the Museum´s programme dedicated to the work of significant 20th century artists whose work yet to be known by a broader public outside of Portugal.
In preparing the exhibition, the active dialogue between Jorge Pinheiro and Cabrita Reis has generated a selection of 80 works focusing on specific periods of Pinheiro’s career dating from the 1960s until the present, in which figurative painting and the language of concrete and conceptual abstractions coincide. The selection also includes a major new sculpture produced specially for the exhibition and the context of the Museum´s architecture by Álvaro Siza. An accompanying catalogue, features the works in the Serralves presentation together with a selection of 90 drawings that form part of a sister exhibition at the Fundação Carmona e Costa in Lisbon. Texts include an interview with Jorge Pinheiro by Cabrita Reis and an essay by poet and critic João Miguel Fernandes Jorge.
After graduating from the Porto School of Fine Arts in the early 1960s, which brought together students of fine arts and architecture, known as the Porto School, Jorge Pinheiro’s first exhibitions of paintings were marked by a figurative realism that alluded to the socio-cultural context of the time in Portugal. Using reduced compositions and a restricted palette, Pinheiro’s rendering of figures and spaces in his early paintings are traversed by the ineluctable silence and abandon of a country under dictatorship.
In 1966, with a Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship, Jorge Pinheiro travelled across Europe, an experience that would prove crucial in his move to geometric abstraction. Influenced by the researches of abstraction-création, the proposals of concrete art, shaped canvas and, in particular, by structuralism, Pinheiro expanded his formal vocabulary into painting, drawing and sculpture that privileged the mechanics of forms of expression in terms of the basic constituents of visual perception.
At the beginning of the 1970s, geometric modulations and chromatic patterns of high contrast were joined by an exhaustive exploration of the notions of rhythm and series, whose formalization pointed towards the artist’s interest in music and numbers in their specific manifestations in Schönberg’s dodecaphony and the Fibonacci sequence. In the 1980s Pinheiro returned to a figurative painting that coincided with international developments of post-modernism. Recovering the social, political and cultural spirit of his early works, Pinheiro´s artistic production over the past two decades has privileged a painting of rich quotation. His most recent works mark a return to the abstraction of music and numbers.
"Jorge Pinheiro: D'après Fibonacci and the world out there" has been organised in partnership with the Fundação Carmona e Costa, Lisbon.
Related Activities OPENING: 15 SEP (FRI), 22H00, FREE ENTRANCE
‘D'après Fibonacci and the world out there’ brings together paintings, drawings and sculptures by the influential Portuguese artist Jorge Pinheiro (Coimbra, 1931). The exhibition is based on an idea by Cabrita Reis, on the invitation of Suzanne Cotter, director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, with an exhibition design conceived by the Pritzker Prize winning architect, Eduardo Souto Moura, and continues the Museum´s programme dedicated to the work of significant 20th century artists whose work yet to be known by a broader public outside of Portugal.
In preparing the exhibition, the active dialogue between Jorge Pinheiro and Cabrita Reis has generated a selection of 80 works focusing on specific periods of Pinheiro’s career dating from the 1960s until the present, in which figurative painting and the language of concrete and conceptual abstractions coincide. The selection also includes a major new sculpture produced specially for the exhibition and the context of the Museum´s architecture by Álvaro Siza. An accompanying catalogue, features the works in the Serralves presentation together with a selection of 90 drawings that form part of a sister exhibition at the Fundação Carmona e Costa in Lisbon. Texts include an interview with Jorge Pinheiro by Cabrita Reis and an essay by poet and critic João Miguel Fernandes Jorge.
After graduating from the Porto School of Fine Arts in the early 1960s, which brought together students of fine arts and architecture, known as the Porto School, Jorge Pinheiro’s first exhibitions of paintings were marked by a figurative realism that alluded to the socio-cultural context of the time in Portugal. Using reduced compositions and a restricted palette, Pinheiro’s rendering of figures and spaces in his early paintings are traversed by the ineluctable silence and abandon of a country under dictatorship.
In 1966, with a Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship, Jorge Pinheiro travelled across Europe, an experience that would prove crucial in his move to geometric abstraction. Influenced by the researches of abstraction-création, the proposals of concrete art, shaped canvas and, in particular, by structuralism, Pinheiro expanded his formal vocabulary into painting, drawing and sculpture that privileged the mechanics of forms of expression in terms of the basic constituents of visual perception.
At the beginning of the 1970s, geometric modulations and chromatic patterns of high contrast were joined by an exhaustive exploration of the notions of rhythm and series, whose formalization pointed towards the artist’s interest in music and numbers in their specific manifestations in Schönberg’s dodecaphony and the Fibonacci sequence. In the 1980s Pinheiro returned to a figurative painting that coincided with international developments of post-modernism. Recovering the social, political and cultural spirit of his early works, Pinheiro´s artistic production over the past two decades has privileged a painting of rich quotation. His most recent works mark a return to the abstraction of music and numbers.
"Jorge Pinheiro: D'après Fibonacci and the world out there" has been organised in partnership with the Fundação Carmona e Costa, Lisbon.
Related Activities OPENING: 15 SEP (FRI), 22H00, FREE ENTRANCE
