LISBON.- Galeria Vera Cortês presents the first exhibition of the Estate of Ana Vieira at the gallery, opening 26 May and staying on view until 5 September.
Following the announcement of the much anticipated representation by the Lisbon gallery, last November, this first exhibition is an opportunity to encounter the work of one of the most relevant Portuguese contemporary artists.
Ana Vieira (1940-2016), started exhibiting her work regularly in the late 1960s and established herself as one of the key figures of portuguese contemporary art in the decades that followed. Anchored in a critical thinking and an artistic language that explores the limits and the traditional supports of art, particularly painting and sculpture, her practice aligns with the conceptual art movement and is markedly influenced by the exploration of everyday objects, spaces, and situations. Often creating scenic installations, the work of Ana Vieira allows for different possibilities for the experiencing of objects, freeing them from their function and inscribing them in a poetic dimension that lies between allegory and simulacrum.
The exhibition “The Narrative Structure” at Galeria Vera Cortês is curated by Antonia Gaeta, who has worked extensively on Ana Vieira’s Estate as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Artist’s Estate (alongside Astrid Suzano and Sofia Gomes), and brings together two works which epitomize the tension between interior and exterior, representation and reality. Exploring the relevance of Ana Vieira’s work, the exhibition presents “Mesa-Paisagem”, an installation from 1973, and the “Close-Up” series, from 2004. As Gaeta writes in the exhibition text: “Taken together, [these] works suspend any stable reading of the image, exposing the processes through which the visible is constituted and destabilized within the very experience of perception.”.
In “Mesa-Paisagem”, Vieira plays with form and function, bringing together a dish and cutlery on top of a painted table cloth, where we find a train going through what seems to be a makeshift tunnel boredered my plastic palm trees toys. Here “[the] table ceases to function as a support and instead structures a field of appearance. The landscape is neither represented nor framed: it emerges within the exhibition device itself, with no defined exterior.”, writes Gaeta.
The selection also acknowledges the memory of the first exhibition Vera Cortês did with Ana Vieira, twenty years ago, at Galeria Promontório, where they showed the “Close-Up” series. In this series, Vieira invites the visitor to peek through a small opening between the wall and a wooden pannel, where they can only see the sectioned reflection of a photograph of domestic, intimate scenes, in different, customized mirrors. This staging of a voyeuristic gaze suspended halfway between access and exclusion runs through many of Vieira’s works and “[in] using invisibility spark off the perverse compulsion of total vision and the subsequent certainty of disappointment.”, as wrote Delfim Sardo in 2008 (Expresso, Revista Única, 13-12-2008).
Vera Cortês, founder and director of the eponymous gallery, views this exhibition as a moment of celebration of an iconic artist whose work has been under represented, as has happened to many women artist of her generation:“Ana Vieira was a full artist, uncompromising, amazingly talented and one whose creative vision and singularity still lacks international recognition. My work with the Estate of Ana Vieira and the guidance of her children, Paula and Miguel Nery, is to advocate for the recognition of this key contribution for the history of contemporary art.”.
