Laura Palma, the young photographer who won the 2026 edition of the novobanco Revelação Award, has a name that is almost homophonous with that of the character who gives her name to a television series by American director David Lynch, which premiered in 1991 and became a cultural phenomenon that endures to this day (there are countless references, particularly in pop and rock music, to the character whose name, although she is absent from most episodes, is the driving force behind the plot of Twin Peaks). One might say that the artist has one of those names that one is compelled to live up to. Her work, centred on portraiture, allows us to draw parallels with the director that go beyond her name: we might relate the question of identity at the heart of his films (always shifting, indefinable) to the way Laura Palma presents moments from her everyday life through portraits of friends (themselves constantly changing); just as we might associate her decision to display the photographs against a (blue) velvet curtain with one of Lynch’s best-known films. The fact that we perceive this display, conceived by the artist without any conscious reference to that cinematic work, as distinctly “Lynchian” is a striking illustration of how a particular name can, even inadvertently, carry a legacy and evoke certain associations. Laura Palmer haunts Laura Palma.

The artist’s distinctive approach lies, to a large extent, in the conviction with which she continues to place portraiture at the centre of her practice, at a time when many acknowledge the difficulty of photographing people (in an age when we regularly photograph ourselves or are photographed by others). Rarely staged or even prepared, her images of friends bear witness to what someone once called the “right distance”: close enough to reveal a sense of intimacy and complicity, yet sufficiently removed to preserve the mystery and inscrutability of each sitter. Sometimes, the same person appears in different photographs. We may not recognise them immediately: their mutability brings them close to the only animal photographed alone in one of Laura Palma’s images, the chameleon.

Organised by Serralves Foundation—Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition is curated by Ricardo Nicolau and coordinated by Giovana Gabriel.

To accompany the exhibition, a monograph on the artist will be published, featuring her photographs alongside texts by the exhibition curator and photographer and editor André Príncipe.