5 art exhibitions to visit in October 2022

1.“Agnès Varda: Light and Shadow” by Serralves
Agnès Varda (1928-2019) claims to have had three lives: first as a photographer, then as a filmmaker, and finally as an artist. Going through each of these three modalities, this exhibition testifies to the way in which her artistic production developed in dialogue with her cinematographic work, and is also representative of the way in which the director reinvented herself. The cinematographic work of Agnès Varda is seen as the founder, if not the precursor, of the French Nouvelle Vague movement. Coming from photography, her arrival in directing was based on a direct relationship with the world, filming outdoors and reinventing the documentary approach. With about four dozen films, shot over more than six decades, it is possible to identify some recurrences in the director's work: the taste for portrait and self-portrait, the provocative descriptions of family and love ideals, the film as a form of action politics (she joined the Black Panthers, fought the Vietnam War, photographed the Cuban Revolution, participated in the feminist movement), the celebration of community sharing and, at a later stage, reflection on the issues of recycling and aging. Filming documental fiction and staged documentaries, Varda's work finds, in its diversity, the strength of a frankness always available to listen to the other. In this cycle, programmed in dialogue with the exhibition Agnès Varda: Luz e Sombra, a selection of her films is presented, revealing the internal reflections of a work marked by the power of dialogue.

2.“Warhol, People and Things” at Casa São Roque
Casa São Roque (R. São Roque da Lameira 2092), one of the most beautiful spaces in Porto, serves as the stage for the exhibition “Warhol, People and Things”. Open to the public until January 31, 2023, this is an extensive exhibition dedicated to Andy Warhol and its influence on several generations of photographers, filmmakers, musicians and multimedia artists. The exhibition includes works by Warhol, but also by his closest friends. A unique opportunity to (re)discover one of the most popular artists of the 20th century. XX! To visit Casa São Roque and the exhibition dedicated to Warhol, the full ticket costs €8; €4 for young people between 13-18 years old and for adults over 65 years old (Monday, Wednesday to Sunday (closed on Tuesdays), from 1.30 pm to 8 pm).

3.“Jorge Queiroz and Arshile Gorky To Go To” on Modern Art Center Collection
The exhibition «Jorge Queiroz and Arshile Gorky. To Go To» brings together drawings and paintings by the Portuguese artist Jorge Queiroz and the Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky, both represented in the Collection of the Centro de Arte Moderna.
Jorge Queiroz and Arshile Gorky. To Go To is an imagined encounter between two artists from different times, places and artistic worlds, but with much in common.
Jorge Queiroz (Lisbon, 1966) is the author of one of the most fascinating artistic universes in the current panorama of Portuguese art and Arshile Gorky (Khorkom, Armenia, c. 1904 – Sherman, Connecticut, United States, 1948), is considered the «father» of post-war American abstract expressionism and a fundamental reference of Western art in the first half of the 20th century. Gorky's first solo exhibition in Europe was held at the Modern Art Center of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1984. Works by the two painters are part of the Modern Art Centre's collection. Powerful imagery, punctuated by strong, vibrant colors and a dominant abstraction, evoke memories and narratives that are expressed in indistinct and unreal ways in the works of both artists. Drawings and paintings by Gorky and Queiroz are part of this exhibition which is constituted as an installation. The works have a life of their own, but they breathe in the same atmosphere.

4. "The landscape is forever" with works by Ai Weiwei, Niek Te Wierik and Sara Leme onEugénio de Almeida Foundation (FEA)
In the long duration of history, the stones constitute a powerful reservoir of events that took place in geological time and in the slow configuration of the landscape. It is in the stone and in the material of the stone that, precisely, one finds evidence of the landscape as an ancestral inscription, even when we know that duration exists in the transitory, as Peter Handke said, in the simple presence, in the outline of the horizon line, in the silent dialogue that the roots establish with the sky. It is in this fragile place, between eternity and sensitivity, that the works of the three artists shown here intersect.
Ai Weiwei has placed his political activism in defense of freedom and civil rights at the center of a wide and multifaceted body of work. But his relationships with Chinese history and culture remain fundamental for the artist, currently residing between Beijing, Germany, England and Portugal. This is what the piece now presented, from 2021, confirms. It is a marble disc originally from Afghanistan which the artist called Bi, evoking the ancient cultural roots of his country. Indeed, in classical Chinese culture Bi is a jade disk used in ritual ceremonies to reflect the sky. In this kind of cultural archeology gesture, the artist displaces the reflection of the sky to the depths of the earth, where the veins of the stone were formed, thus bringing to the surface the thickness of time, tradition and ancient geology.
Niek Te Wierik is a Dutch artist who has lived in Portugal for a long time. With abundant work in the areas of drawing and painting, the artist is an insatiable observer of the natural environment that surrounds him, and which he later fixes in a meticulous laboratory process (from photography to sketching, then drawing and painting). In the paintings that make up the exhibition, the stone is color in the form of a dolmen, and it is shadow in the form of light, crossing the millennial horizon of stone with the ephemeral shadows of the olive groves of Alentejo.
It is precisely a reflection on ephemerality that brings us the work of Sara Leme, a young artist in whose path jewelery, dance and anthropology intersect. In the exhibition, Room (2021) is presented, an installation with a memory of recent global history: on a canvas, made with juxtaposed surgical masks, the artist confronts us with projected images of Alentejo forests, on an almost motionless plane, with the lightness of the wind animating the foliage, as if trying to suspend the course of time
As part of the program for the 8th Congress of the Portuguese Anthropology Association, the exhibition challenges the present through the landscapes that we are, and invites us on a journey as long as poetry, between the tree and the shadow, between the stone and the horizon .