Portugal - Porto, part 2 of 2 (A visit to the Serralves)

Visiting the Serralves is one of the best things to do in Porto.  The Serralves is a combination Museum, Park, Villa, and House of Cinema.

Here's some more information about the Serralves:  Serralves - Wikipedia

Here are some of the highlights of our visit. (The following descriptions are from Daily Art Magazine.) Please click on each photo to enlarge.

The Serralves Foundation is a playground for art lovers, a wide area devoted exclusively to creation and pleasure. It offers a museum of contemporary art surrounded by a large park, including a House of Cinema, a treetop walk, and amazing sculptures (among others by Olafur Eliasson, and currently a wonderful Louise Bourgeois’ Maman). In front of the gigantic spider, you find the Villa Serralves, a wonderful example of Portuguese Art Deco architecture.

(Fooling Around) Inside the Museum

The Serralves houses 85 of Joan Miro's work, so if you're a fan, it would be an absolute delight to visit.

The collection on display is the property of the Portuguese state. On display at the Serralves Foundation, it includes 85 works and covers the length and depth of Miró’s career. Paintings, collages, sculptures, drawings, and weavings provide an outstanding introduction to Joan Miró’s major artistic preoccupations. That is to say, a constant search to simply express his inner poetry on visual terms.

Miró devoted his life to developing a singular language at the limits of abstraction. With his own vocabulary, he describes his vision of the world. He reduces objects to simple contours. The forms are distilled to their essential elements in order to make them dance with the colors. They are always in balance, whatever the medium.

Miró also set fire to his paintings, as a way of desacralizing his work, his image, and also art in general. This approach resulted in five “burned canvases”. They were exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1974, where Miró celebrated a major retrospective. According to the artist’s instructions, two of the canvases were hung from the ceiling so that the front and back of the objects could be seen. This mode of display is still respected at the Serralves Foundation: the location of one of the burned canvases is in the central space. Both sides are visible and, as a bonus, if you look through Miró’s work you can see Louise Bourgeois’ spider sitting just behind the glass, overlooking the gardens.

For more works of Miro featured in the exhibit, please read the Daily Art Magazine article.

The House of Cinema contained an Agnes Varda exhibit, Light and Shadow.

Here's the description from the Serralves:

Agnès Varda (1928-2019) claimed to have had three lives: first as a photographer, then as a filmmaker, and finally as a visual artist. Passing through each of these three modalities, this exhibition testifies to the way in which Varda’s artistic production was developed in dialogue with her cinematographic work, and was also representative of the way in which the director reinvented herself.

In this exhibition, the contrast between light and shadow offers a starting point to revisit the constitutive polarities that underpin Varda's oeuvre – the tension between the material and the immaterial and between the real and the imaginary, or the disproportion between motifs and forms that often lead to an inversion of scales: between the monumentalisation of the insignificant and the desacralisation of the revered. The two installations on display: Une cabane de cinéma: la serre du bonheur (A Cinema Shack: The Greenhouse of Happiness, 2018) and Patatutopia (2003) are based on an essentially identical confrontation: the false vivacity of the sunflowers and the deterioration of the potatoes, the stereotypical image of happiness and the allegorical representation of old age. Oppositions that are ultimately aligned and sublimated in an antagonism between a critique of uselessness and the ethical and aesthetic principles of re-use, combating waste and obsolescence – in all senses: material, symbolic, political, filmic and human.

Agnès Varda: Light and Shadow marks Varda's return to Serralves, after her exhibition in 2009. At that time, she had the opportunity to meet Manoel de Oliveira, and recorded the moment with the small video camera that she always carried with her. The sequence, that was included in the TV series Agnès de ci de là Varda (2011), shows Manoel de Oliveira and Agnès Varda as they imitate Chaplin, while filming each other. It offers the perfect preamble to this exhibition: an encounter in which they jovially shared their concerns about cinema and life.

Curated by António Preto, Director of the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira.

The House of Cinema also has the personal archive of film director Manoel de Oliveira.  Here's the description from the Serralves:

The PERMANENT EXHIBITION - MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA occupies first floor of the Casa de Serralves’ old garage, which was adapted and expanded by a project from the architect Álvaro Siza that sought to preserve the character and configuration of the existing building.

This exhibition presents a careful selection of awards, highlighting how Manoel de Oliveira's films were received by the leading international film festivals. In this same room, there are also four paintings which belonged to Manoel de Oliveira’s daily routine and that one may find in some of his most personal films. This part of the exhibition also includes a selection of documentation from the Manoel de Oliveira collection, entirely deposited in Serralves.

This exhibition offers two different approaches to the cinema of Manoel de Oliveira: an interactive videowall that allows the visitor to explore in detail the vast work of the Portuguese director; and a second section, consisting of five simultaneous and synchronised projections that surround the spectator, composed by several excerpts from Manoel de Oliveira’s films.

Given it is a permanent exhibition it also aims to be a dynamic one. In addition to functioning as a repository of the activities developed by the Casa do Cinema in relation to Manoel de Oliveira’s oeuvre, it will be permanently renovated and reconfigured, thereby offering multiple perspectives of the director’s cinema.

Click here for a sample of his work.

We also enjoyed the Cindy Sherman exhibition. 

Cindy Sherman: Metamorphosis presents a series of works spanning the artist’s career from her earliest work to the latest. The exhibition is organized in dialogue with the artist and in partnership with The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles, an institution that has collected in depth the work of Cindy Sherman for over thirty years.

 

Most well-known for photographs that feature the artist as her own model playing out media-influenced female stereotypes in a range of personas and environments, Sherman shoots alone in her studio, serving as director, photographer, make-up artist, hair stylist, and subject. Her decades-long practice of performing portraiture, has produced many of contemporary art’s most iconic and influential images. For the presentation at Serralves, the Museum galleries will be transformed specially to receive this ambitious exhibition, creating a theatrical set for the storyboard written by the artist’s photographs. It will also include new work, specifically conceived for the Serralves Museum: a large photographic mural, which give an additional uniqueness to the display.

 

The artist does not usually give titles to her works, intending to avoid pre-interpretations or preconceived readings, which may influence the viewer, leaving the construction of their stories to the discretion of each person. The images are, however, grouped in series and numbered and explore various themes and techniques, reinforcing differentiation and classification: Untitled Film Still (1977-80), Bus Rider (1976-00), Fashion (1983-84), The Fairy Tales (1985), The Disasters (1986-89), The Historical Portraits (1988-90), Sex Pictures (1992), Horror and Surrealistic Pictures (1994), Masks (1995), Broken Dolls (1999), The Hollywood/Hampton Ladies Portraits (2000), The Clowns (2003-05), Society (2008).

 

In the exhibition, these series are presented with no chronological order, but rather building a narrative. Sherman’s individual compositions and narratives refer to a complete and complex lexicon of female identities: the early works full of visible emotions and in later works emotions gradually excluded. The works are not self-portraits, they are representations perfected by the distance of the camera or lens through which they are captured, or as Rosalind Krauss defines it, they are “a copy without the original”.

 

At end of the 1980s, Sherman felt the need eliminate herself from the images and created unreal and grotesque images, scenes of accidents, composed of supernatural and terrifying characters embodying irrational fears and nightmares, creating revulsion and macabre settings. Gradually, the artist’s body is replaced by false breasts, human excrescences, bodily fluids, sexual debris, medical prostheses, which later give rise to the Sex Pictures (1992), one of Sherman’s most daring series in which the artist arranges mannequins into pseudo-pornographic tableaux, deliberately un-erotic and challenging the porn industry standards.

 

Sherman’s return to the centre of the image took place around 2000 with Head Shots, where she features a series of portrait studios, or the disturbing series of Clowns (2003-05) and later of aging women. The artificial and fake body parts force the viewer to confront with the staged aspect of the work, but the tragic and vulgar aspect of the characters compels the views to feel a certain sympathy and respect. On the other hand, there is a noticeable change in the positioning of the camera, the alteration of the scenarios, the overlapping and saturation of layers of props and strange elements in the composition, as well as the size of the print. Later with the Society series (2008), Sherman continues her investigation into distorted ideas of beauty, self-image and aging in a youth and status obsessed society, with characters set in sumptuous backgrounds and the works presented in ornate frames.

 

Sherman goes from analogue to digital and like her characters she experiences with various possibilities: truly natural scenarios in her first images, film techniques such as “rear projection”, studio photographs (the place where the artist has greater control in the construction of the image), the cyclorama and finally the inclusion of digital backgrounds in overlapping images. Although Sherman’s work tends to be classified by theorists and critics as associated with feminism, violence or voyeurism and having representation as a central issue, the artist avoids this theoretical instrumentalization and association. When building a character, Sherman is not thinking a particular person, rather she thinks of a genre and the complexity of the narrative is shaped in the specificity of the relationship between the scenario and the character.

 

For the presentation at Serralves, the Museum galleries were transformed to receive this ambitious exhibition, creating a theatrical set for the storyboard written by the artist’s photographs. It also includes a new piece, specifically conceived for the Serralves Museum: a large photographic mural, which give an additional uniqueness to the display. Sherman’s work should be seen as a dramaturgy for a play in which the artist is both the subject and object of her work while building a constellation of her own.

 

Cindy Sherman: Metamorphosis is produced by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto in collaboration with The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles, and curated by Philippe Vergne.

Please visit the next part of our visit to the Serralves, the three-dimensional book exhibit of writings from Agustina Bessa Luis.  This was our favorite of the exhibits.