History(ies) of Art: Recent Acquisitions in the Serralves Collection
Intento de conservación IV, 2015. Photo: Luis Asín. Courtesy Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid.
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves +info
The exhibition featured 19 works by 12 artists that have been brought into the Museum’s Collection in the previous four years. Ranging from diverse media such as sculpture, drawing, collage, photography and film, the pieces represent themes that are recurrently explored by contemporary artists, namely the relationship between art and memory (personal, autobiographic and historic), the recognition of the virtues of fragility and impermanence (to the detriment of stability and monumentality), the questioning of the limits of the medium through its relationship with other forms of expression, and the bond between the art of now and the artistic, political and social movements that marked our more or less recent past.
Bunga’s presented work was Intento de conservación IV (2015), alluding to the conservation and preservation of artworks. Ricardo Nicolau writes:
“Behind a protective glass stands one of the artist’s most recognizable works. Cardboard and tape are used by Bunga to create three-dimensional paintings, sculptures and large-scale, site-specific interventions. His ephemeral constructions, which draw attention to fragility and precariousness, are an allusion to the transitory constructions that are found in urban contexts serving as shelters to the homeless. Intento de preservación IV confronts us with the problem of the permanence and transmission of eminently performative and deliberately perishable artworks.”
Artists: Carlos Bunga, Cabrita, Adriano Costa, José Pedro Croft, Trisha Donnelly, António Júlio Duarte, Carla Filipe, Renato Leotta, Dayana Lucas, Jorge Queiroz, Francisco Tropa, Marijke van Warmerdam.
Curator: Isabel Braga
2022. Porto, Portugal.
