70 – 80 Arte Portuguesa

Collective painting, sculpture and photography exhibition of contemporary Portuguese artists organised on the initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Portuguese Secretary of State for Culture (SEC), with the cooperation of the Portuguese Embassy in Brazil.
This initiative, promoted by the Portuguese state, aimed to publicise in Brazil (and then extending to the United States) Portuguese art produced during the 1970s and 1980s, continuing the cultural exchange established with Brazil since 1979. This exchange was underlined by the attendance of the President of the Portuguese Republic Mário Soares at the exhibition opening during his official visit to Brazil in 1987.
Pursuing this dissemination mission, the importance of publicising art as a guarantee of getting to know a community was highlighted by José Sommer Ribeiro, since: it is through the visual arts that we can better understand the spirit of a society (70.80 Arte Portuguesa, 1987).
The director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (FCG) Modern Art Centre (CAM), José Sommer Ribeiro, was appointed to curate the exhibition, assisted by art critic Rui Mário Gonçalves and a representative of the SEC, painter Fernando Calhau, who together were responsible for selecting 23 Portuguese artists and 75 works to be exhibited in the three art forms included in the exhibition: painting, sculpture and photography.
Regarding the criteria and objectives that guided their choices, the curators aimed to create an understanding of the current situation of Portuguese art through its key moments, demonstrating Portuguese artists' work over almost two decades, from the experimentalisms and reflective approach of the end of the 1960s to the reinterpretation of references based on individual creative freedom and openness to a wider cultural world found in artistic practices of the 1980s (ibidem).
The sample included the transition between conceptualist practices which reverberated from the Alternativa Zero [Zero Alternative] exhibition and the return, renewal and critique of the traditional disciplines of painting and sculpture. In the introduction to the catalogue, Rui Mário Gonçalves provided a summary: Ten years allowed many things to change in the art world. Ten years is, however, a relatively short period to find an explanation for those changes only in the arrival of new generations. In fact, the presence of some older ones increased. Proposals pre-dating conceptualism were recovered by some artists who claimed it or approached it; above all, however, there was also a return to painting, when seeking controversy, which brought it closer to what it was also trying to fight against: conceptualism and minimalism (70.80 Arte Portuguesa, 1987).
As well as cooperation with some Portuguese art galleries, which lent pieces for the exhibition, the SEC made the same request to the FCG. In the words of the head of the SEC's International Cultural Relations Office: due to the quality of works in the Modern Art Centre's collection, it is believed that some of those pieces are of the utmost importance to achieve a most representative and important whole (Letter from the head of the SEC's International Cultural Relations Office to the FCG president, 21 Jan. 1987, Gulbenkian Archives, CAM 00118).
The grounds for this request demonstrate the importance of the CAM's collection now the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum's Modern Collection bearing in mind the high quality and current nature of Portuguese artistic values. However, some aspects linked to conservation of the pieces on such long journeys, and their absence from the Modern Art Centre for such a long period of time, limited this selection to just works found in the CAM's reserves (Note to the president, 26 Jan. 1987, Gulbenkian Archives, CAM 00118).
As a travelling exhibition, it was held in Brasilia, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and afterwards in the United States at the Port of History Museum in Philadelphia.