Events

The access to culture is one of the Foundation priorities, hence it supports and develops several initiatives in this field.

On the occasion of the launch of the Architectural Guide Eduardo Souto de Moura Built Projects Portugal, publisher A+A Books invited the artist and photographer Nuno Cera on a “journey” through mainland and insular Portugal, portraying the projects that are featured in the book in a hors-texte arrangement that evokes, in fragments, the architect’s design and language.

It was from this “journey” that the exhibition Mineral Poetry has been originated. Held at Galeria Millennium,in Lisbon, from 23 February to 19 of May.

The layout of the exhibition, which was decided by the artist, consisted of 18 photographs and 2 videos. Those were chosen fragments of the work by architect Eduardo Souto de Moura to whoever intentionally “looks”.

These photographs acknowledged the poetics of Nuno Cera’s work and were an essay of sorts on his personal, sensitive experience and vision of the objects he portrayed. The analysis that his gaze provokes led the viewer to deepen the feeling of reality and beauty while juxtaposing an allegory of the architecture work. This exercise of artistic language, which resists the objective look, leaded Nuno Cera to an experience of freedom in space, form, matter and place.

Mineral Poetry went beyond the limits of a photography exhibition. It revealed what Nuno Cera's gaze created: a free essay on the greatness of Eduardo Souto de Moura’s architecture, understanding its power through the poetic delicacy that sets him apart as an artist.

BEYOND SURREALISM - a thematic exhibition held at the Millennium Gallery under the Millennium bcp Shared Art Collection initiatives - ended on February 3. Soon it will be hold in Museum of Faro, with new curatorship. Stay tuned for more information.

BEYOND SURREALISM is a thematic exhibition based on the works of the excellent Millennium bcp collection.
Surrealism was a historical movement that emerged in European art from the 1920s onwards, and was subsequently rekindled in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Like other European avant guard movements (Cubism, Abstractionism, Expressionism), Surrealism, heralded in Paris (above all through the theorisation of the poet André Breton) rapidly spread across borders to become one of the most acclaimed artistic expressions in the entire world.
In Portugal, Surrealism was the most structured movement of our artistic culture and gained a firm foothold during the 1940s. As in other countries, there were rifts and confrontations but also a joint attitude of affirming the right to freedom, to dreaming, questioning social conventions and hypocrisies. It is reflected by the life and work of Mário Cesariny, the only artist to have remained faithful to that ideology throughout an entire lifetime, applying it in writing, poetry and painting.
The Millennium bcp Collection does not possess any works of this foundational period which belong to the main museum collections, in particular the National Museum of Contemporary Art/Chiado Museum and the Modern Collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. However, the works gathered together here, some of which were produced by surrealists and some of which were not, allow us to accomplish their ultimate intention: that Art should be an immersion in dreams and imagery, provoking what we think we see and know.