The initiative for the La fenêtre de ma tête exhibition came from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (FCG), which organised another event at the same time dedicated to the Os Reis [The Kings] series of portraits by the same artist at the Modern Art Centre (CAM).

Organised as an inventory of Costa Pinheiro’s work and a self-retrospective guided by the artist himself (Costa Pinheiro added “self-retrospective” and the dates 1982-89 to the exhibition title), the exhibition was planned according to original museography criteria, demonstrated by the great door-silhouette of Costa Pinheiro’s head used to enter the show and which, seen from the inside, had the brightness of a window. This door-silhouette (the artist commented in another interview conducted by Jorge Fallorca) had two meanings, not simply representing a window through which the painter looked onto the world but also a window through which visitors were allowed to see and understand the artist’s universe (Fallorca, Diário de Lisboa, 21 Dec 1989).

The journey through the exhibition was organised into three sections: “Portrait-windows”, “Toys – the Citymobil” and “Painting in progress”. It displayed a sequence of previously unseen paintings and stretched throughout the gallery, moving on to the object-projects of the 1968-71 Citymobil, and ending with a set of more recent pictures: the Trípticos de Dom Sebastião [the King Sebastian Triptychs], which were works in progress at the time.  

According to José Sommer Ribeiro, the exhibition was marked by a “parade of works, some filled with great irony and others with enormous imagination, and yet others that are extremely poetic, a true portrait of Costa Pinheiro and his painting” (Costa Pinheiro. La fenêtre de ma tête…, 1989).

In an interview with Jorge Letria, Costa Pinheiro commented on the meaning of the works in the La fenêtre de ma tête series, underlining that: “It aims to be a staging-painting of all that my painter’s imagination has created and learned up to now” (Letria, Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias, 28 Nov 1989, pp. 8-9).

The art critic Alexandre Pomar said, regarding the works presented in the exhibition, that “the painter makes the repeated visits to his studio and his imagination – to previous work, to the physical space and the painter’s technical instruments, to the themes that have occupied him and the iconography that he has been inventing and collecting – his own retrospective gaze, in other words, into the strategy of his most recent work” (Pomar, Expresso, 8 Dec 1989).