'Jorge Pinheiro (Coimbra, Portugal, 1931) is one of the most influential names in Portuguese art from the second half of the 20th century. He was part of the fleeting collective “Os 4 vintes” (The 4 Twenties), alongside Ângelo de Sousa, Armando Alves and José Rodrigues, who held their first exhibition in 1968. Throughout a career spanning more than five decades, Jorge Pinheiro has developed a characteristically theoretical and intellectual body of work, which is visually diverse and distinctive in the Portuguese context.

His practice is informed by principles of mathematics and semiotics, and is particularly inspired by the Fibonacci sequence, according to which each successive number is the sum of the two previous numbers. The sculpture/object Babel (2010/2017) is based on a prototype in plexiglass designed in the early 1970s. Forty years after its original conception the work was materialised for the monographic exhibition Jorge Pinheiro: D’après Fibonacci e as coisas lá fora (Jorge Pinheiro: According to Fibonacci and the things outside), held at the Serralves Museum in 2017. Babel is part of a set of abstract sculptures, corresponding to a period of more structuralist period of formal thinking, relating to the function of a square or a cube.

This initiative is part of the Serralves Collection Touring Exhibition Programme, which aims to make the Foundation’s collection accessible to different audiences across the country.