Photo: Porto Convention & Visitors Bureau/flickr
Located on a sprawling 45 acres in west Porto, Portugal, the Serralves Foundation may not have the same name recognition as the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or Centre Pompidou in Paris, but it should have it. The foundation, established 25 years ago, began with a deposit from the secretary of state of culture with a mission to raise the general public’s awareness of contemporary art. When the state acquired the property in 1986, the Art Deco Serralves Villa, formerly the home of a count, along with its massive surrounding gardens, were already on its grounds. A decade later, the Serralves Museum, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza, was built on the grounds. This year celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Serralves Foundation and the 15th anniversary of Serralves Museum. It has grown to be Portugal’s most visited museum, with over 300,000 visitors annually.
A larger-than-life Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen sculpture of a hand shovel greets guests as they enter the grounds. The Serralves collection includes a number of Portuguese artists, like Jaime Azinheira’s 1981 painting of four men converging called Sueca, and Julião Sarmento’s 1985 Memory Tunnel, and Paula Rego’s 1995 painting of an unhappy-looking woman tugging at her undergarments. In addition, a colorful performance piece consisting of four white-gloved performers rearranging colorful geometric shapes by Amalia Pica is currently on display, as are a number of works by Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vō. There are also works on display inside the villa.
“I would say I inherited an adolescent,” said British art historian Suzanne Cotter, who became the Serralves Museum director last year. “The collection has some wonderful things, but it’s now poised to become that much more significant.”
Cotter told me that the museum is actively acquiring work through artists they commission and donations, but that they must make sure that the pieces work well within the institution’s mission. “With a museum, you want to be able to tell a story, offer a narrative, give context,” she said. “You need to think it through a little bit more, but that’s fun, that’s interesting.”
Below is a list of five not-to-miss works to check out at the Serralves Foundation:
1. Dan Graham’s Double Exposure (2001)
“The piece is a triangular structure, two sides are two-way mirrors and the front side is a color transparency superimposed on the glass,” said the artist in an interview with Brooklyn Rail. “Fifty meters in front you can see through the image to observe the landscape shifting in terms of times of day and season. The spectators can enter the structure and see each other inside and outside of the two-way mirror surfaces.”
2. Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen’s Plantoir (2001)
“Seeking a form specifically designed for a garden setting, the artists developed the idea of the shovel until it reached its final shape as a curved ‘blade’, undulated on the outside and smooth on the inside, with its tip partly buried in the ground, giving the whole sculpture a directional force towards the ground, as if it was indeed being dug by the object,” reads the Serralves Foundations’s website. “Removed from its original context, and with its massive change in scale, this familiar object gains a strange quality.”
3. Amalia Pica’s A ∩ B ∩ C (line) (2013)
According to the Serralves website, the work “proposes abstraction as a set of improvised tableaux produced in real time before an audience — otherwise abstract geometrical forms become elements in a performative conversation. The work becomes the enactment of forms of compromise or collaboration, a geometric representation of collectivity brought to life by bodies moving in space.”
4. Alberto Carneiro’s Ser Avore e Arte (2000-2002)
The Portuguese artist made this piece to interact with one of the many Atlas Cedar trees in the garden. The title, which translates to, “Being Tree and Art,” is a literal interpretation of the work.
5. Thomas Schutte’s Is There Life Before Death? (1998)
This piece, which consists of eight ceramic vases, is one of the German artist’s earliest ceramic works.
For more information, visit serralves.pt/en/.
