BRUSSELS.- Over the course of the past five decades, Ana Jotta (1946, Lisbon, Portugal) has developed a deeply personal artistic vocabulary that rejects and even antagonizes all forms of classification and identification. Instead of any recognizable style, she takes from, subverts, and trespasses across various aesthetic categories, making a world that exists only on her own terms. Instead of attempting to encompass Jotta’s entire practice, the exhibition narrows its focus around a specific aspect of her work: the expanded sense she brings to the act of drawing.
Drawn to collecting the most unclassifiable images, objects, phrases, or even marks on a wall, her acts of gathering are fully enmeshed within her acts of making, and as she extracts from what she experiences in the world, she puts the pieces back together in an order that is entirely her own. Rejecting any claims of authorship or authority, Jotta considers her work to be what emerges as she constantly situates and re-situates her own life within the world around her.
While some of her drawings involve pencil and paper, many of them are unbound from the confines of the page and exist as embroideries, sewn leather, bleached fabric, and even objects. For Jotta, to draw is to draw out—in the sense of demonstrating, discovering, or fleshing out the potential connections that lie dormant between disparate images and references. In her hands, to draw is also to draw from—to take, to appropriate, and to extract from the world. And yet even the simple act of drawing a line, in its most basic sense, is about creating links and forging associations and serves as an apt metaphor for her process more generally. The artist expands the language of drawing by inventing a field where sketches, stitches, scribbles, silhouettes, scratches, and scissors contribute to an ecosystem of overlapping gestures. They mirror her approach as an artist and embody her disregard for the categories and boundaries that traditionally separate aesthetic registers—including the line between art and life.
The exhibition features work from the late 1980s until the present day and is a much expanded version of Ana Jotta: Never the Less, an exhibition that took place in 2023 at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco.
Ana’s work weaves together strings of small life encounters. It is full of detail, pathos, and eccentricity. She is fiercely attentive, always alert to her surroundings, and when a specific word, piece of fabric, or image crosses her path, she recognizes it as containing the traces of a daily life—proof that life has happened to it and that it can be brought into the space of art. It reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s famous line—tell all the truth but tell it slant—in that her work tells a jagged kind of truth. One that misbehaves but never lies. - Anthony Huberman, co-curator of the exhibition
Ana sees herself as someone who doesn’t conform to shared social norms and values. But to operate at the margins of social conventions doesn’t necessarily mean to revolt against society—in her own words, the artist is the one who growls but doesn’t bite. - Miguel Wandschneider, co-curator of the exhibition
Ana Jotta (b.1946, Lisbon) has built a body of work that challenges notions of authorship and that obscures the line between art and life. From the late 1970s until the late 1980s, she worked in theatre both as an actress and costume and stage designer. On the side, she started her practice as an artist working across all media. She has had monographic exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich (2024), Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2023), Casa São Roque - Centro de Arte, Porto (2019), Temporary Gallery, Cologne (2018), Établissement d'en face, Brussels (2016), Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine (2016), and Culturgest, Porto (2016). A first retrospective of her work was presented at the Serralves Museum in Porto in 2005 and a second one at Culturgest, in Lisbon, in 2014. She lives and works in Lisbon.
From 2006 until 2017, Miguel Wandschneider (b. 1969) was artistic director at Culturgest, Lisbon and Porto. In this role he curated many exhibitions, including with Jean-Luc Moulène (2007), Walid Raad (2007), Willem Oorebeek (2008), Jochen Lempert (2009), Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys (2009), Koenraad Dedobbeleer (2010), Asier Mendizabal (2010), Michael E. Smith (2012), Jef Geys (2012), Michel Auder (2013), Walter Swennen (2013), Ana Jotta (2014 and 2016), Helen Mirra (2014), Florian Hecker (2015), Guy de Cointet (2016), Dorota Jurczac (2016), Isidoro Valcárcel Medina (2016), and Alice Creischer (2017). Since 2017, he has curated a large survey of the work of Jochen Lempert at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, CA2M, in Madrid (2018), as well as exhibitions by Ana Jotta at Temporary Gallery, in Cologne (2018), in collaboration with Regina Baruncke, the CCA Wattis Institute, in San Francisco (2023), in collaboration with Anthony Huberman, and the Kunsthalle Zurich (2024).
Anthony Huberman (b. 1975, Geneva, Switzerland) is a curator and writer based in New York. He currently is the Artistic Director of GPS (Giorno Poetry Systems), a nonprofit organization, founded in 1965 by the artist John Giorno, that brings together artists, musicians, and poets. Over the past twenty-five years, he has worked as Director and Chief Curator of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, Founding Director of The Artist's Institute in New York, Chief Curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Curator at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Curator of SculptureCenter in New York, and Director of Public Programs at MoMA PS1 in New York. He has curated exhibitions at Raven Row in London, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, MACRO in Rome, ICA London, Culturgest in Lisbon, and Secession in Vienna, among others, and major group exhibitions include Drum Listens to Heart (2022), Mechanisms(2017), 8th Liverpool Biennial: A Needle Walks into a Haystack (2014), For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn't there (2009), and Grey Flags (2006).
