PORTO.- Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents a major summer programme bringing together three exhibitions that address some of the most urgent questions shaping contemporary experience: the political force of language, the instability of historical memory, and the representation of human identity in all its complexity.
Together, Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers, Vexation of Spirit—The Duerckheim Collection x Serralves, and Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect form a powerful constellation of exhibitions in which art becomes a means of confronting the present: its conflicts, omissions, distortions, and possibilities of resistance.
Opening this summer, Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers marks the celebrated American artist’s first solo exhibition in Portugal. For more than four decades, Holzer has transformed the way language is experienced, inserting words into public space through posters, projections, stone works, LED signs, paintings, and sculptural installations. At Serralves, the exhibition traces the trajectory of her practice from early text-based works such as Truisms and Inflammatory Essays to later works that explore inscription, erasure, censorship, and the violence of suppressed information. In a moment marked by the saturation of images and written content, Holzer’s work asks what happens when words are amplified, distorted, emptied of meaning, or made to disappear.
Vexation of Spirit—The Duerckheim Collection x Serralves presents the first comprehensive exhibition of the Duerckheim Collection at Serralves. Assembled over four decades by Christian Count Duerckheim and recently placed on long-term deposit at the Foundation, the collection is among the most significant private collections of contemporary art in Europe. Bringing together nearly 90 works by leading international artists, the exhibition is structured around society, war, and religion as forces that have shaped human history and continue to define the present. Works by artists including Georg Baselitz, Theaster Gates, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Hermann Nitsch, Darren Almond, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Gilbert & George, Zhang Huan, and Cerith Wyn Evans reflect on power, ideology, belief, violence, and the ethical challenges of historical and social disorder.
In July, Serralves opens Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect, one of the largest-ever surveys of the American painter’s work in Europe and the first exhibition dedicated to the artist in Portugal. Bringing together nearly 90 works not widely seen in Europe, the exhibition is organised thematically and explores Neel’s radical commitment to the human figure at a time when abstraction dominated the American art world. Her portraits of family members, neighbours, workers, immigrants, artists, activists, queer figures, Black and Puerto Rican communities in Spanish Harlem, and public personalities reflect the major political and social transformations of the twentieth century. For Neel, imperfection was not a flaw, but a condition of human existence—a way of seeing that remains powerfully resonant today in debates around representation, gender, diversity, inequality, and beauty.
These three exhibitions are presented at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by lvaro Siza Vieira and inaugurated in 1999. Established in Porto in 1989, the Serralves Foundation is dedicated to contemporary culture and to fostering dialogue with audiences of all backgrounds and ages through contemporary art, architecture, cinema, landscape, and the environment. Comprising the Museum, the Villa, the Park, and the Manoel de Oliveira Cinema House, Serralves has been designated a National Monument by the Portuguese government and is one of the most visited cultural institutions in Portugal.
Through this summer programme, Serralves reaffirms its commitment to presenting artistic practices that engage critically with the most pressing questions of contemporary society, while creating encounters between international artists, historical reflection, and new publics.
