Vexation of Spirit. The Duerckheim Collection x Serralves

Vexation of Spirit. The Duerckheim Collection x Serralves is the title of the first showing at the Foundation of the contemporary art collection assembled by the collector Count Duerckheim and recently placed on deposit at Serralves. Having been assembled over four decades, this collection includes works by some of the most important artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Considered to be one of the most significant private collections in Europe, it reflects an artistic vision marked by moral unease and historical awareness.

By focusing attention on the themes of religion, society and war, the exhibition Vexation of Spirit is intended to stimulate debate, linking contemporary artistic creation with the transformations of history and the urgency of the present.

The exhibition’s title is simultaneously intriguing and suggestive, employing an expression that introduces a note of strangeness and evokes a state of existential angst, whether physical, moral or spiritual in nature. However, to avoid any ambiguity about the meaning of ‘vexation of spirit’, it is important to understand that the exhibition’s title is taken from the Book of Ecclesiastes, a sacred text of the Hebrew Bible and also part of the Christian Old Testament.

In offering visitors a testimony that questions the course of history, the exhibition provides a unique illustration of themes relating to the evolution of beliefs, social structures and political conflicts in the contemporary history of the last 70 years, bringing together around 90 works by 34 artists and thus representing a particularly significant moment in the context of contemporary art in Portugal, above all through the inclusion of key artists who were not previously represented in the Serralves Collection.

Organised by the Serralves Foundation and presented at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition is curated by Marta Moreira de Almeida, the Museum’s deputy director, working in close consultation with the collector Count Duerckheim.

List of artists: Darren Almond, Tommy Ballestrem, Georg Baselitz, Isaak Brodski, Roman Buxbaum, Leon Delarbre, Dinos and Jake Chapman, Cerith Wyn Evans, Theaster Gates, Gilbert & George, Antony Gormley, Francisco de Goya, Peter Gut, Damien Hirst, Zhang Huan, Stefan Hunstein, Anselm Kiefer, Alfred Kremer, Michael Landy, Konrad Lueg, Markus Lüpertz, Raoef Mamedov, Hermann Nitsch, Haralampi G. Oroschakoff, Blinky Palermo, A.R. Penck, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Matthias Wähner, Carl-Heinz Wegert and Rémy Zaugg.