Summer Guests
Event Slider
Date
23 Jun – 03 Oct 2016
- Closed on Tuesday
Location
Calouste Gulbenkian Museum
Summer Guests brings contemporary artists to the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum proposing new exhibition contexts that highlight crosscutting and unexpected relationships, and formal or conceptual proximity of works from different eras.
Art works like the Mesopotamian low-relief, the Persian carpets, the showcase of Japanese lacquers or Turner’s The Wreck of a Transport Ship are thus enhanced by the challenge of being confronted with another time and other images which reflect contemporary modes and languages, also calling upon the timeless permanence of some causes. Fernanda Fragateiro will enhance with sculptural interventions some of the places where the events of the Summer Garden will be presented in addition to other locales selected by her.
Topics
Bela Silva
Diogo Pimentão
Fernanda Fragateiro
Francisco Tropa
Miguel Branco
Miguel Palma
Patrícia Garrido
Pedro Cabral Santo
Rui Chafes
Susanne Themlitz
Vasco Araújo
Wiebke Siem
Yael Bartana
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Asta Gröting
Asta Gröting’s Bodenplatte, which has been placed close to Auguste Rodin’s sculpture Jean d’Aire, Le Bourgeois de Calais – L’Homme à la Clef, directly references the imaginary markings of the characters’ feet and questions the value of the base or the ‘ground’ of conventional sculpture. In Rodin’s studio in Meudon, Gröting found the mould for the base of Les Bourgeois de Calais (the famous version that includes six characters) and filled in the empty spaces. She also wanted to examine the place of today’s bourgeoisie and the way in which art can handle this kind of questioning.
Asta Gröting (Herford, Germany, 1961) lives and works in Berlin. Studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1981-86). Since 2009, she is professor appointed for life, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany.
Among the most recent group shows: und Touch, After The Butcher, Berlin, Germany; This is a Voice, Wellcome Trust, London, UK; Höhenrausch – Engel und Doppelgänger, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria.
Gröting speaks of Beuys as a major influence, and her interest in human interaction is felt throughout some of her projects. Much of her work attempts to illustrate not only the invisible parts of the human body, but also the ways in which the invisible connects with the visible. To this end she has used a wide range of media, always finding entirely new means to express a given situation. These include materials such as pearls and polystyrene, bronze and rubber, as well as motors which make the sculptures move and turn.
In the late 1990s Gröting began making films and over the subsequent decade worked with internationally acclaimed ventriloquists to make a series called The Inner Voice.
Recent works, including “Acker” [Soil], “Kartoffeln” [Potatoes] and “Feuerstelle” [Fireplace], return the viewer to the basic conditions necessary for human survival: earth, food and warmth. Most of her works represent the two sides of one concern: how to understand our relationship with others and with ourselves.
Asta Gröting is represented on several public collection in Germany, Austria, USA, France, Turkey, Spain, Sweden and Belgium.
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Bela Silva
In the same room as several attractively and neatly arranged Chinese ceramic pieces, Bela Silva’s contemporary ceramic pieces strike a disruptive tone, albeit one that initially appears to provide a certain continuity, in the zoomorphical and zoological figuration of the motifs, the typology of the pieces (vases, jars, fantastical animals), their decorative nature as ceramic pieces, whereby they diverge somewhat from the norm, and their chromatic palette. The dragons, in particular, are said to have been directly inspired by the Fo Dogs (Qing Dynasty) displayed in the large show-cabinet.
Bela Silva (Lisbon, 1966) is currently living in Lisbon and Brussels. Studied at both the Porto and the Lisbon Fine Arts Schools in Portugal; attended also Ar.Co, Lisbon, the Norwich Fine Arts in the UK and the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in the USA.
Among her shows: Chicago’s Ann Nathan Gallery (1994) and Rhona Hoffman Gallery (1997); Lisbon’s Tile Museum (1999), Museu Anastácio Gonçalves, Palácio da Ajuda, and Fundação Ricardo Espírito Santo (Lisbon, 2007); and also shows in China and in Japan. She has participated in group shows of tile art in Brazil, Spain, and France; ran ceramics workshops in Japan and Morocco; and has been awarded residencies at Kohler, Wisconsin, USA, and at Fábrica Bordalo Pinheiro, Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. She has created several public art pieces, namely tile panels for the Alvalade subway station in Lisbon; panels for the Sakai Cultural Center’s Gardens in Japan; and panels for the João de Deus School in the Azores Islands.
Her work in ceramics cites and comments on pieces of different heritages, deflecting visual and cultural frameworks with irony, excess or simple stylisation.
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Diogo Pimentão
Diogo Pimentão’s cut out loop drawn with graphite takes on a certain decorative quality when placed near René Lalique’s mirror, which is itself strongly related to sculpture and drawing, and presents an unexpected three-dimensionality, presence and lightness. In both cases we find ourselves looking at knots and intertwined strands, a recurring motif in Art Nouveau, but also ubiquitous in the imaginary world of myths, from Mercury’s caduceus to the serpents that appear in so many legends, shamanic manifestations and the image of the labyrinth, which is often conceived of as a massive knot.
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Fernanda Fragateiro
Fernanda Fragateiro’s sculptural interventions on benches designed by Ribeiro Telles highlight some of the spaces that serve as a venue for the Jardim de Verão events, along with other places especially selected by the artist. The artist’s approach often forges a connection with an architectural system based on architectural drawing, construction, installation and the demarcation of space. Her work uses the mirrored surfaces to highlight passages between the two-dimensional planes of the image and the three-dimensionality of the space, the virtual ‘screens’ that multiply it, the sensory experiences of thermal and tactile change, the striking interruption of limits and outlines by others that overlap them, and the aesthetic examination that is also demanded by practical enjoyment
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Francisco Tropa
On the plinth of the absent sculpture of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Apollo, the suspended, fragmentary figure made of glass bones and ‘organs’ by Francisco Tropa emphasises the rising movement that is characteristic of this Greek god, that great traveller moving across the immense vault of the heavens. The sudden lightness and transparency of the glass creates a contrast with the heaviness and opacity of the bronze, suggesting different destinies effected upon the decomposition of the body parts, and proposing a memento mori for all Vanitas.
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Miguel Branco
Miguel Branco’s sculpture paraphrases the statuette of the official Bes, from Late Period of ancient Egypt. The artist was directly inspired by this figure, and his work makes reference to the statuette’s position and bearing. However, he replaces the intelligent face of the figure with the hominid contours of an almost simian head, on the very threshold of animalism and primitivism. The relationship with death and writing (in the same room we find the stele of another scribe), two fundamental aspects of Ancient Egypt, are thus evoked in this contrasting representation of what might be seen as the rise and ‘fall’ of the human being.
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Miguel Palma
Miguel Palma uses an Empire-style vase to challenge assumptions about the museum as a place of conservation and the protection of heritage: an electric mechanism at the base of the object makes it move at one-minute intervals, allowing time for visitors who are perusing the show-cabinet of 18th-century porcelain to be surprised by it. The joke can be taken at face value, yet the movement also echoes the way in which the vase was made, as well as the action of the human hands that have carried it from place to place. The show-cabinet and the plinth thus cease to be the sort of safe places that are associated with museums, instead issuing a shock to our tendency to idealise such institutions.
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Patrícia Garrido
Interior is not only the name given to the rubber and metal piece by Patrícia Garrido, but also relates to the nature of the pieces that the artist presented at the Museu do Chiado in 1995 and the issues raised by them. These include a kind of bag in the shape of a flower, which, like other pieces in the same series (Jogo de Damas), has a probable sexual resonance. Positioned close to the 16th-century velvet embroidered silk parasol, it evokes a feminine realm due to the pieces’ fortuitous harmony in colour and material.
Patrícia Garrido (Lisbon, 1964) graduated in painting at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes in Lisbon (ESBAL).
She has participated in numerous group exhibitions which include: Mais Tempo, Menos História, Serralves Foundation, Porto (1996); O Império Contra-Ataca, Galeria ZDB, Lisbon (1998); Squatters, Galeria do CRUARB, Porto (2001). Solo exhibitions include: T1, Serralves Foundation, Porto (1998); Móveis ao Cubo, Desenhos ao Acaso, TREM Galeria Municipal de Arte, Faro (2009); Peças Mais ou Menos Recentes, EDP Foundation, Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis and Galeria Fernando Santos, Porto (2013). Her work is featured in the following collections: Museu do Chiado, Serralves Foundation, Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Funchal, EDP Foundation, Coleção António Cachola and also the Coleção Banco Privado. She received the Prémio União Latina prize in 2001.
From the principles of assemblage, intervened appropriation and abstract construction, the artist creates objects that appeal to the careful reading of their own processes, surprise and intrinsic nature. Isolated or conceived for dialogues in the space, they have the presence and the tactile appeal of sculpture, but also the resourcefulness of drawing and the intriguing challenge of their latent symbolic reference.
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Pedro Cabral Santo
Pedro Cabral Santo’s film Turner Pic appears below Turner’s The Wreck of a Transport Ship, thus allowing the artist to superimpose a dialogue about UFOs and aliens, featuring RGB colour bars, a system traditionally used to aid communication with deaf-mutes. The artist has created this from a truly surprising dialogue in relation to this picture within the Gulbenkian Museum, such that the textual substance of his piece provokes a sense of strangeness, while also overlaying codes and replicating the way in which public reception adds something to every work.
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Rui Chafes
The small pieces in fimo sculpted by Rui Chafes in a 1989 series he called O corpo não entra, evoke molluscs, corals, flowers, variations on female sexual morphology – a set of relics, whose singularity is accentuated by the neighbourhood of Japanese lacquered boxes, also very small, worked in detail, intimate, in formal drift sometimes unusual.
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Susanne Themlitz
In the area devoted to 18th-century furniture, the two pieces by Susanne Themlitz convey an experience of integration that is as unexpected as it is effective, at once timeless and deeply evocative of its era. The first is an abstract painting (Respiração. Pausa – entre dois pontos [Breathing. Pause – between two points]) featuring strong colours and planes, which the artist describes as a ‘permeable landscape and suspended transformation’. The second piece is a table bearing objects (a mirror, an amethyst, a globe, a wooden rule and a pane of glass) – an iconological reference to the scientific achievements of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, with a surreal slant that places it within the same realm and aura of refinement as the pieces of furniture that surround it.
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Vasco Araújo
Four series of drawings by Vasco Araújo line the corridor that leads visitors from the area devoted to the art of the Far East to that of European art. Pink Family, Green Family, White and Blue Family, and Armorial Family (echoing the names of the Chinese ceramics that visitors have seen in the room that they have just left) are almost imperceptible drawings of damaged vases and goblets unearthed during archaeological excavations. The artist pairs these with extracts from Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others. This association suggests a powerful metaphor for art, time, languages and tangible and intangible heritage.
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Wiebke Siem
Wiebke Siem’s massive carpet beater, which is suspended over an Indian rug, matching it for sheer size, robs the decorative object of its almost sacred aura, reducing it instead to its practical and utilitarian dimension. In doing so, Siem makes direct reference to a series of photographs by Hans Bellmer in which the shadow of this object, which is common in German homes, dwells alongside various ‘dolls’, while also prompting an association with the shadow in the films of Murnau, or with other famous carpets, such as the one found in Freud’s study. Yet it mainly refers to the place of women in the home, calling roles, emotions and archetypes into question.
Wiebke Siem (Kiel, Germany, 1954) lives and works in Berlin. She studied sculpture from 1979 to 1984 at Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg where she was a professor for sculpture from 2002 to 2008. The artist was awarded numerous grants and residencies, recently the Goslarer Kaiserring (2014).
The artist’s solo exhibitions include: Wiebke Siem – Der Traum der Dinge, K20 Grabbeplatz, Labor, Düsseldorf (2016); Wiebke Siem, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg (2015); Wiebke Siem – Kaiserringträgerin der Stadt Goslar, Mönchehaus-Museum, Goslar (2014).
Selected group of the last exhibitions with participation of the artist: Gesichter zwischen Figur, Porträt und Maske, Neues Museum, Nürnberg (2015); Regionalismus, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2013); and Weltreise-Kunst aus Deutschland unterwegs.
Starting from sculpture and installation, sometimes located on the border between art and design, Wiebke Siem’s works comment on social conventions related to issues of gender, appearance and masks, the creation of myths and collective value. Humour and irony, citation and invention direct his critical eye and the figurative options which give it its expression.
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Yael Bartana
From a common geographical region, the Middle East, emerge a Mesopotamian bas-relief and an animated film by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. The first, a figure of a winged genie with the attire of a warrior; the second, soldiers and policemen from that troubled region, digitally transformed into ‘clay’ characters that move like reliefs in the formless and uniform environment of war. Geography and formal similarity draws them together, yet it is also important to highlight the radical difference in the idea of combat (magical initiation in the first case) that distinguishes them.
Yael Bartana's (Kfar Yehezkel, Israel, 1970) films, installations and photographs explore the imagery of identity and the politics of memory. Her starting point is the national consciousness propagated by her native country, Israel. Central to the work are meanings implied by terms like 'homeland', 'return' and 'belonging'. Bartana investigates these through the ceremonies, public rituals and social diversions that are intended to reaffirm the collective identity of the nation state.
In her Israeli projects, Bartana dealt with the impact of war, military rituals and a sense of threat on every-day life. Between 2006 and 2011, she has been working in Poland, creating the trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned, a project on the history of Polish-Jewish relations and its influence on the contemporary Polish identity. The trilogy represented Poland in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).
In recent years Bartana has been experimenting and expanding her work within the cinematic world, presenting projects such as Inferno (2013), a “pre enactment” of the destruction of the Third Temple, True Finn (2014), that came into being within the framework of the IHME Festival in Finland, and Pardes (2015) which was shot during a spiritual journey in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Her latest work, Simone The Hermetic, is a site-based sound installation that takes place in future Jerusalem.
Publications
Related Information
Credits
Curators
Leonor Nazaré
Penelope Curtis
Exhibition project
Mariano Piçarra
Graphic project
Pedro Leitão