Who is Ana Jotta?
Ana Jotta was born in Lisbon in 1946, where she still works and lives. He attended the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon, later joining (1965-68) the École de Arts Visuels et d´Architecture de l´Abbeye de la Cambre, in Brussels. After a period in which she devoted herself mainly to theatrical activity, as an actress (1969-80), her activity focused on the visual arts. Since the early 1990s, he has been a regular at art fairs and biennials (ARCO, Brussels, Johannesburg, Barcelona, etc.). In 2005, he held a retrospective exhibition at the Serralves Museum.
Ana Jotta's path
Since the beginning of the 1980s, Ana Jotta has been building a body of work that lives in a very narrow limbo between her personal life and her path. Thus, he developed his work along a series of discoveries that incorporate a certain type of erasure: of his own previous steps, of the ideologies of modernism, of the myths of postmodernism, of the very notion of authorship that he both deconstructs and reconstitutes. References from the history of art mix with references from popular and vernacular culture. Ana Jotta has been dismantling the notion of a «unique style» or «coherent».
What are the characteristics of Ana Jotta's works?
Her eclectic and heterogeneous work is marked by an attitude of freedom, strongly linked to everyday life, through objects, texts, ideas and, in this case, also music, which the artist collects and collects. . Ana Jotta has a multiple work divided into different techniques, from painting, sculpture, installation, photography, ceramics. In this way, he has included in his works the decorative arts, traditionally classified as “minor arts”.
Over the years, the diversity of his work has traveled through the memories of modern and contemporary art, trying to find, paradoxically, a poetics of error, failure, laziness, the possible magic of the artistic gesture. In an interview towards the end of his life, Marcel Duchamp said that “There are three types of taste: good taste, bad taste and indifferent taste. I am for indifferent taste.” Ana Jotta's journey seems, at times, to be an irony about this (in itself ironic) theory of “indifferent taste”.
The influence and retrospectives of Ana Jotta
Ana Jotta's work is a journey through the countless possibilities of her wanderings and elective affinities, in a gallery where Duchamp and Beckett, Broodthaers and Georges Perec, Joseph Cornell and Leporello, Don Giovanni's servant who would invent the loves of the master. Ana Jotta has exhibited her work at the most prestigious foundations and institutions such as Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France; Etablissement d'en face, Brussels and in Malmo Konsthall, Malmo. Her first solo exhibition took place at Galeria EMI – Valentim de Carvalho, in 1985. Rua Ana Jotta was the title of the artist's first retrospective exhibition, presented at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2005. She is represented in the collections of the Centro de Modern Art – Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Luso-American Development Foundation and EDP Foundation, in Lisbon, as well as at the Serralves Foundation, Porto, and at ARCO, Madrid. He also showed his work at Culturgest Porto with the exhibition “CASSANDRA”, at Culturgest Lisbon with “A Conclusion of Precedent”, and also at Casa de São Roque with the exhibition “INVENTÓRIA”. In 2013 she was distinguished with the EDP Foundation Art Grand Prize and in 2014 with the AICA Prize. Later, in 2017, Ana Jotta received the Rosa Shapire Prize, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
