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 a visual 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, being also representative of the way in which the director reinvented herself. The cinematographic work of Agnès Varda is considered the founder, if not the precursor, of the French Nouvelle Vague movement. Coming from photography, her arrival to directing was made through 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 work of the director: the taste for portraits and self-portraits, the provocative descriptions of family and love ideals, the film as a form of action politics (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 recycling and aging issues. Filming documentary fiction and staged documentaries, Varda's work finds, in its diversity, the strength of a frankness always available to listen to the other. This cycle, programmed in dialogue with the exhibition Agnès Varda: Luz e Sombra, presents a selection of her films that reveal 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, is 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 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 famous 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 adults over 65 years old (Monday, Wednesday to Sunday (closed on Tuesdays), from 1:30 pm to 8:00 pm).
3.“Jorge Queiroz and Arshile Gorky To Go To” on Collection of the Center for Modern Art
The exhibition «Jorge Queiroz and Arshile Gorky. To Go To» brings together drawings and paintings by Portuguese artist Jorge Queiroz and Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky, both represented in the Collection of the Center for Modern Art.
Jorge Queiroz and Arshile Gorky. To Go To is an imagined meeting 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 key reference for Western art in the first half of the 20th century. Gorky's first solo exhibition in Europe took place at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's Center for Modern Art in 1984. Works by the two painters are part of the Center for Modern Art's collection. Powerful imagery punctuated by strong and 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 an installation. The works have a life of their own, but breathe in the same atmosphere.
4. "Landscape is forever" with works by Ai Weiwei, Niek Te Wierik and Sara Leme atEugénio 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 the 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 trace 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 on display intersect.
Ai Weiwei has placed his political activism in defense of freedom and civil rights at the center of an extensive and multifaceted 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 that the artist called Bi, evoking the ancient cultural roots of his country. Indeed, in classical Chinese culture Bi is a jade disc used in ritual ceremonies to reflect the sky. In this kind of gesture of cultural archeology, the artist shifts the reflection of the sky to the depth of the earth, where the veins of the stone were formed, thus bringing to the surface the thickness of the time of tradition and millenary 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 then fixes in a meticulous laboratory process (from photography to sketching, then drawing and painting). In the paintings that are part of the exhibition, the stone is color in the form of a dolmen, and it is a shadow in the form of light, crossing the millennial horizon of the stone with the ephemerality of the shadows of the olive groves of Alentejo.
It is precisely a reflection on the ephemerality that the work of Sara Leme brings us, a young artist in whose path jewellery, dance and anthropology intersect. In the exhibition, she presents Room (2021), 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’s dehesa, 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 of the 8th Congress of the Portuguese Association of Anthropology, the exhibition challenges the present time through the landscapes that we are, and invites us on a journey with the duration of poetry, between the tree and the shadow, between the stone and the horizon. .
It is a series of one hundred engravings with drawings of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) – which became known as the «Vollard Suite», executed between 1930 and 1937. Resulting from an edition carried out by the Museum of the City of Mülheim (Germany), in 1992, this collection of engravings was loaned to the Guard Museum by the Museo de Artes do Gravado a la Estampa Dixital, in Ribeira – A Coruña, thus continuing a relationship of esteem and trust between the two institutions. Curated by the Guarda Museum team, the exhibition is entitled Pablo Picasso – The Games of Love and Death – The Vollard Suite (1930-1937). This series of prints was commissioned to the Malague artist by art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) in 1933.
