HISTORY(IES) OF ART: RECENT ACQUISITIONS IN THE SERRALVES COLLECTION

HISTORY(IES) OF ART RECENT ACQUISITIONS IN THE SERRALVES COLLECTION

Carlos Bunga, Cabrita, Adriano Costa, José Pedro Croft, Trisha Donnelly, António Júlio Duarte, Carla Filipe, Renato Leotta, Dayana Lucas, Jorge Queiroz, Francisco Tropa, Marijke van Warmerdam.

The exhibition features 19 works by 12 artists that have been brought into the Museum’s Collection in the last four years. Ranging from diverse media such as sculpture, drawing, collage, photography and film, the pieces represent themes that are recurrently explored by contemporary artists, namely the relationship between art and memory (personal, autobiographic and historic), the recognition of the virtues of fragility and impermanence (to the detriment of stability and monumentality), the questioning of the limits of the medium through its relationship with other forms of expression, and the bond between the art of now and the artistic, political and social movements that marked our more or less recent past. The show not only highlights the interdisciplinary character of some pieces (sculpture and performance are deliberately melded, for instance) and their ability to manifest gestures and matters that are often made invisible despite their decisive presence in everyday life (things as elementary as light and natural elements), but features several generations of artists – including both emerging and established names –, so as to create a bridge with the works that set out the Collection and were acquired in the past.

Moreover, some of the works are donations and long-term deposits by artists and collectors who recognize the Serralves Collection as one of the better contexts for their conservation, study, contextualization and presentation.