LISBON.- Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian kicks off the season with two exhibitions that propose new ways of imagining the world. The Exhibition of a Dream, by Mathieu Copeland, transforms real dreams into a sound experience, taking over the Engawa Space. Murky Waters, by Inês Zenha, presents sculptures and installations made of adobe, ceramics, and water, giving shape to hybrid bodies and subterranean landscapes.

In the Main Gallery at the headquarters, Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian presents Painting Is Easy. Do It Yourself!. Curated by João Maria Gusmão, the exhibition brings together works from the la Caixa Foundation’s Contemporary Art Collection that question the role of art today.

The CAM Collection continues to occupy a central place in our programming. Starting in November, On Drawing Places—an exhibition featuring more than fifty artists—focuses on the idea of place and its multiple dimensions.

The Exhibition of a Dream
September 19, 2026–February 22, 2027
Curator: Mathieu Copeland

Inspired by real dreams, a sound exhibition conceived by Mathieu Copeland takes shape. In it, dreamlike accounts by creators, including Gabriel Abrantes, Lee Ranaldo, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are transformed into sound. FM Einheit reimagines them as musical compositions, performed by guest musicians and members of the Gulbenkian Choir. The result moves between sound, imagination, and memory, as the exhibition explores dreams as a space for creation, desire, restlessness, and the construction of new narratives. The exhibition booklet brings together the original dreams and reproductions of the mandalas.

Inês Zenha: Murky Waters
September 19, 2026–February 8, 2027
Curators: João Mourão and Luís Silva





Project originally produced by CA2M – Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid

Murky Waters is the first major institutional exhibition by Inês Zenha (Lisbon, 1995) in Portugal, bringing together painting, sculpture, and installation in an immersive setting. Using materials such as adobe, ceramics, and water, the artist constructs hybrid forms, circulation systems, and subterranean landscapes. Moving between personal experiences and shared realities, the exhibition explores identity, desire, fragility, and control. Questioning the fluidity of bodies and borders. Water emerges as an agent of change: it has the power to connect, dissolve, and imagine new forms of coexistence.

Painting Is Easy. Do It Yourself!
October 10, 2026–February 8, 2027
Curator: João Maria Gusmão

In collaboration with ”la Caixa " Foundation.

Painting Is Easy. Do It Yourself! brings together works from the Contemporary Art Collection of the ”la Caixa" Foundation, curated by João Maria Gusmão. Based on a photograph by Antoni Muntadas, the exhibition addresses the alienation of the workforce, the economy of leisure, and the transformations in the notions of production and creativity. Works produced over the last five decades form a journey that intersects experimental artistic practices with critical perspectives, questioning the role of art in a society dominated by the pursuit of constant visibility, self-entrepreneurship, and the valuation of productivity.

On Drawing Places: A topology derived from the CAM Collection
November 7, 2026–March 29, 2027
Curators: Sérgio Mah and Leonor Nazaré

The notion of place forms the conceptual axis of the exhibition, in which a significant body of work takes on particular relevance, highlighting gestures, aesthetic attitudes, and conceptual formulations associated with the acts of delimiting, constructing, inhabiting, or mapping. These actions are understood as ways of affirming, inscribing, or making visible a presence in specific territory.

The exhibition also explores the idea that the creative act is intimately linked to processes of demarcation, appropriation and reconfiguration of space, particularly those involving drawing, simultaneously understood as a concept and as a privileged means of experimentation with forms.

Spanning a historical period that extends from the 1950s to the present, the exhibition brings together more than fifty artists—including various key figures from the history of national and international art—and a vast and diverse range of artistic practices, including painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, photography, and video.