For over forty years, Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) has questioned and transformed the way we experience language, projecting words onto buildings, carving them into stone, and embedding them into culture. The American artist’s wide-ranging practice also encompasses posters, sculptural installations, drawing, painting, and electronic signs. Her emphatic capitals have appeared in urban landscapes around the world, insinuating themselves into the channels of official and commercial communication to deliver messages of a different sort, from unflinching accounts of the horrors of war to poetic celebrations of the joys of being alive. And while Holzer’s word-based art was first created for the streets and remains at home there, her work can also be found today in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Guggenheim, and many others.

Wrong Answers at the Serralves Museum will be Holzer’s first solo exhibition in Portugal. It follows a trajectory from the emergence of her text works—beginning with her iconic Truisms and Inflammatory Essays—to their proliferation across stone benches and sarcophagi, paintings, roboticized LED signs, human bones, and more. At a historical moment when the saturation of visual and written content across media neutralizes and distorts meaning, the show spotlights the simultaneous amplification and devaluation of words, through works that feature some form of eradication. These icons of limiting and lying range from Holzer’s painterly appropriations of redacted government documents to the smashed heaps of her own stone sculptures and electronic signs.

From liberated language to redaction and censorship, Wrong Answers examines how Holzer’s use of text reflects both the saving power of words and the violence inherent in the suppression of information, ideas, and freedom.

Produced by the Serralves Foundation – Museum of Contemporary Art Porto, the exhibition is curated by the museum’s director, Philippe Vergne.