GALERIA VERA CORTÊS

Preview 27 February – 03 March 2019

www.veracortes.comIFEMA – Feria de MadridStand 9C11

ALEXANDRE FARTO AKA VHILSCÉLINE CONDORELLI

DANIEL BLAUFUKSGABRIELA ALBERGARIA

GONÇALO BARREIROSJOANA ESCOVAL

JOÃO LOUROJOSÉ PEDRO CROFT

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils

Camada Series #12, 2018Hand-carved and laser-cut advertising posters185 x 125 x 30 cm

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils

Deconstruct Series #10, 2018Hand-carved and laser-cut advertising posters208 × 112 cm

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils

Dicey Series #08, 2019Hand-carved and laser-cut advertising posters215 × 130 cm

Alexandre Farto aka VhilsLisbon, 1987

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils has developed a unique visual language based on the removal of the surface layers of walls and other media with non-conventional tools and techniques. He began interacting with the urban environment through the practice of graffiti in the early 2000s. Peeling back the layers of our material culture like a modern-day urban archaeologist, Vhils reflects on the impact of urbanity, development and global homogenisation on landscapes and people’s identities. Destroying to create, he delivers powerful and poetic visual statements from materi-als the city rejects, humanising depressed areas with his poignant large-scale portraits.

Since 2005 he has been presenting his work around the world in exhi-bitions, events and other contexts – from working with communities in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, to collaborations with reputed institutions such as the EDP Foundation (Lisbon), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Barbican Centre (London), CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), or the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (San Diego), among others. An avid experimentalist, besides his groundbreaking bas-relief carving technique, Vhils has been developing his personal aesthetics in a plurality of media: from stencil painting to metal etching, from pyrotechnic explosions and video to sculptural instal-lations. He has also directed several music videos, short films, and one stage production.

Vhils’ work is represented in several public and private collections in various countries.

Zanzibar 1:10, Monstera Deliciosa and Schefflera Actinophylla, 2018Concrete, soil, plants, vynil110 x 200 cm (approx.)

Céline Condorelli

Plant Study: Monstera Deliciosa, 2018Wax print on drafting film, stained with watercolour and acrylic ink59,4 x 42 cm

Plant Study: Schefflera Actinophylla, 2018Wax print on drafting film, stained with watercolour and acrylic ink59,4 x 42 cm

Céline Condorelli

Céline CondorelliFlorence, 1974

Lives and works in London. Céline Condorelli’s extensive body of work stems from developing

possibilities for ways of living and working together and enquiring into property relations and everyday life, which addresses notions such as public space, institutions, politics, the commons, fiction, and articulation. Céline Condorelli’s practice is committed to the continuing exploration of less explicit elements of structures and framing mechanisms through which an individual engages with the world – be they cultural, economic, material, social, or political– the apparatuses of visibility often taken for granted that she calls ‘support structures’. Her works “focuses on the ac-tion of showing itself, in its material, temporal nature, precisely because the act of showing implies boundaries and classifications, taboos and hierarchies. In other words, there is always the implicit awareness of an organized visibility that comes to be institutionalized, to be inscribed on social space, even though it may set off from a simple exhibition support”.

A selection of exhibitions and projects include Zanzibar, King's Cross, London, UK (2018); Céline Condorelli: Epilogue, P! New York, USA (2017), Anren Biennale 2017, Chengdu, China (2017), Proposals for a Qualitative Society (Spinning), Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, The Netherlands (2017), Céline Condorelli: Corps á Corps, IMA Brisbane, Australia (2017), Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016); MASP (São Paulo, 2016); Liverpool Biennial, UK (2016); 20th Sidney Biennale (2016); Display Show, Stroom den Haag, Eastside Projects, Temple Bar Gallery (The Hague, Birmingham, Dublin, 2015–2016); bau bau, HangarBicocca (Milan, 2015); Visions at Work, Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm, 2015); Positions, Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, 2014); Céline Condorelli, Chisenhale Gallery (London, 2014); Disobedience Archive, Castello di Rivoli (Turin, 2013); Surrounded by the Uninhabitable, SALT Beyoglu (Istanbul, 2013).

Daniel Blaufuks

I selfish, 2018Inkjet print on Hahnemühle cotton paper160 × 120 cm

Daniel BlaufuksLisbon, 1963

Daniel Blaufuks lives and works in Lisbon. Blaufuks has been working on the relation between photography and

literature, through works like My Tangier with the writer Paul Bowles. More recently, Collected Short Stories displays several photographic diptychs in a kind of “snapshot prose,” a speech based on visual fragments that give indication of private stories on their way to become public. The rela-tion between public and private and individual and collective memory, has been one of the constant interrogations in his work.

The artist has been showing his photography and videoworks, but also books, installations and films. The documentary Under Strange Skies was shown at the Lincoln Center in New York. Exhibitions include: Fondazione Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy; LisboaPhoto, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal; Fundação Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; PhotoEspaña, Madrid, Spain, where his book Under Strange Skies received the award for Best Photography Book of the Year in the International Category in 2007, the year he received the BES Photo Award as well. He has published the artist book Terezín with Steidl, Götingen.

In 2011 he had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and in 2014 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon. Daniel Blaufuks received the AICA/MC/FMB Award for Visual Arts in 2016.

Gabriela Albergaria

In Waiting, 2018Colour pencil on paper (Heritage Wood Free, 3125 gsm, John Purcel)179 x 102 cm

Limite Urbano (P1150530, 1a), 2016-2018Inkjet print and colour pencil on paper (Heritage Wood Free, 315gsm, John Purcel)63 x 67 cm

Gabriela Albergaria

Gabriela AlbergariaVale de Cambra, 1965

Gabriela Albergaria lives and works in London.Albergaria's work involves one territory: Nature. A nature manipu-

lated, planted, transported, set in hierarchy, catalogued, studied, felt and recalled through the ongoing exploration of gardens in photography, drawing and sculpture. The artist views gardens as elaborated constructs, representational systems and descriptive mechanisms that epitomize a set of fictional beliefs that are employed to represent the natural world. Gardens are also environments dedicated to leisure and study, cultural and social processes that produce a historical understanding of what is knowledge and what is pleasure.

More generally, the images of gardens and plant species employed by the artist are used as devices to reveal processes of cultural change through which visions of nature are produced. Mediated by representa-tion systems they generate different versions of what we see as land-scape—itself a complex system of material structures and visual hierar-chies, cultural constructs that define the framing of our visual field.

Having completed a degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Porto, she held numerous residencies, such as RU (New York, 2015-2016); Flora ars +natura (Bogotá, 2015); Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2000/2001); Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, 2004); Villa Arson, Centre National d’Art Contemporain (Nice, 2008); The University of Oxford Botanic Garden, in collaboration with The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (Oxford, 2009/2010) and Winter Workspace, Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center (New York, 2012).

A selection of her solo shows includes: Ah, Finalmente, Natureza, Fórum Eugénio de Almeida (Évora, 2015); Terra/Território, Consulado Geral de Portugal em São Paulo (2015); Two Trees in Balance, Socrates Sculpture Park (New York, 2015); Time scales, Vera Cortês Art Agency (Lisbon, 2014); O Balanço da Árvore Exagera a Tempestade, Galeria Vermelho (São Paulo, 2014); No hay tal cosa como la naturaleza, Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural (Caracas, 2013); Invertir la posición, Galeria Wu (Lima, 2012); Térmico, Pavilhão Branco do Museu da Cidade (Lisbon, 2010); ABRACADÁRVORE, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahía (São Salvador da Bahía, 2008).

Her work is represented in various collections such as Colecção Norlinda e José Lima, Portugal; Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz, Brazil; Museu Nacional dos Açores, Portugal; Colecção Luís Augusto Teixeira de Freitas, Portugal; Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahía, Brazil; KFW bankenngrupe, Germany; BESart – Banco Espirito Santo, Portugal; Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) - Calouste Gulbenkian Fondation, Portugal.

Untitled, 2018Painted stainless steel190 x 280 x 110 cm

Gonçalo Barreiros

Untitled, 2016Painted iron 13 x 5,5 x 0,1 cm

Gonçalo Barreiros

Gonçalo BarreirosLisbon, 1978

Lives and works in Lisbon. Since the beginning of his career, Barreiros has committed himself

to sculpture. In his pieces, the dimensions of chance, time, disappoint-ment, imperfection and imponderability shape a conception of sculpture as an unstable, uncertain realm. Sculpture is a possibility, a pause, an ac-cident. Each piece is the outcome of a long process of creation and re-search, they are about time, they define a condition. Perhaps the most determining feature of his practice is the tendency to take the exhibition space as a stage and to make the pieces agents that are often disturbing, sarcastic, comic or exasperating. Using a wide variety of expedients and technical resources, the artist has produced a very diverse body of works, sometimes presenting extremely simple pieces, using a drawing, a sound, a noise, a word, a hum, or a metallic trill, but also the instability of a bal-ance, a difference in scale or proportion, the absence of colour. Much of the singularity of Gonçalo Barreiros' work seems to lie in the way in which he prepares the double movement that his works set in motion. Revealing a sophisticated domain of the mechanics of subversion, irony and incon-gruity, his works confront the spectator with his most intimate and ines-capable reactions, and at the same time with the prejudices, censures and violence that govern many of our common values. The work triggers a set of much more discreet reflections that focus on the spectator himself, his convictions and his idiosyncracies, but also on this space of supposed consensus where the friendly rules and protocols exist and where the pro-cesses of identity construction of the communities take place. Inevitably, these are spaces of loss and erosion, places of leveling and compromise where deviation, exception, and free will do not rage.

Graduated in Sculpture from Ar.Co art school in Lisbon and Master of Fine Arts from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he received a schol-arship of Masters Degree from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

A selection of his solo exhibitions include Sleeping Village (with Bruno Cidra), Appleton Square (Lisbon, 2017), Declaração Amigável, Galeria Vera Cortês (Lisbon, 2017), Condomínio Fechado, O Armário, (Lisbon, 2017), nosey parker, Galeria Vera Cortês (Lisbon, 2014), Vraum, Chiado 8 and woodpecker, Ermida de Belém (Lisbon, 2013) and n.17, Empty Cube in Colégio das Artes – Universidade de Coimbra (2013).

His work has also been shown in several group exhibitions, among others Black Box: Passeios, Museu do Caramulo (2018), Involuntary Memory, Luis Adentado (Valencia, 2017); Sala dos Gessos, Museu da Eletricidade (Lisbon, 2016); Sem título é um bom título, Ar Sólido (Lisbon, 2016); Materiais Transitórios, Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (Lisbon, 2016); Canal Caveira, Cordoaria Nacional (Lisbon, 2015); O Riso, Museu da Eletricidade (Lisbon, 2012); Plus 1 (New York, 2010); Triangle Room (Curatorial Program of the Chelsea College of Art and Design, 2008) and EDP Art Prize – New Artists, Museu de Serralves (Oporto, 2003).

Using what you have to remember what you saw IV, 2019Gold and parakeet featherApprox. 80 × 100 x 30 cm

Joana Escoval

Untitled (The Sun Lovers), 2019GoldApprox. 7 x 10 x 5 cmEd. 3 + AP

Joana Escoval

Each definition, a kind of death (VIII), 2018BrassApprox. 130 x 70 x 0,5 cm

Joana Escoval

Joana EscovalLisbon, 1982

Lives and works in Lisbon. Joana Escoval's delicate sculptures are made out of gold, silver or

copper, chemical components which produce matter and existence that both human bodies and everyday objects share. These natural elements are not randomly selected, as she searches for the origin and purpose of the object, how boundaries between nature and culture intertwining or/and efface. They produce matter and therefore existence. It’s this primor-dial matter that both living and non-living beings share. Consequently, the unity between the object and the subject, between the real and the spir-itual is the main idea in Escoval’s work. She examines how everything is entangled and connected.This is the reason why Escoval’s sculptures can not only be perceived as appearances in their raw, authentic state but as dissolution of matter. When the artist melts the metals and allows them to take the form and the aura of people and space that surround them turning them into conducts of energy, tools for keeping away the bad en-ergy and absorbing the good one.

A selection of exhibitions and projects include Fiorucci Art Trust, London (2019); The sun lovers, Tenderpixel, London (2018); The word for world, Greynoise, Dubai (2017), Fiducia Incorreggibile, Galeria Vera Cortês, Lisbon (2017), Transmissions from the Etherspace, La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2017), Current Detours, HalfHouse, Barcelona (2017), I will go where I don't belong / Volcano Extravaganza, Forucci Art Trust, Stromboli (2016); I forgot to go to school yesterday, Kunsthalle Lissabon and Kunsthalle Tropical, Iceland (2016); Lichens Never Lie, La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art, Rennes (2016); Matter Fictions, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2016); The lynx knows no boundaries, Fondation d ́entreprise Ricard, Paris (2015); Europe, Europe, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2014).

She won the BES Revelação Prize in 2012 (Serralves Museum) and was nominated for the EDP Foundation New Artists Prize in 2015, in Portugal. Escoval has received a fellowship from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and FLAD Foundation in 2013. Among other residencies attention is drawn to Fiorucci Art Trust Residency in Stromboli in 2015, and RU, in New York in 2013/14. She has recently published two flexi-discs with Atlas Projectos and Palmário Recordings.

Blind Form #007, 2019Graphite on laminite94,5 x 121,5 cm

João Louro

Blind Form #006, 2019Graphite on laminite94,5 x 121,5 cm

João Louro

Land’s End #05, 2002Metal panel65 x 165 cm

João Louro

João LouroLisbon, 1963

João Louro lives and works in Lisbon. Louro’s body of work encompasses painting, sculpture, photography

and video. His work descends from minimal and conceptual art, with special attention to avant-garde movements of the early twentieth cen-tury. It draws out a topography of time, with references that are personal but mainly they are generational. With regular recourse to language as a source, as well as the written word, he seeks a review of the image in con-temporary culture, starting out from a set of representations and sym-bols from the collective visual universe. Minimalism, conceptualism, Pop culture, structuralism and post-structuralism, authors such as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Georges Bataille and Blanchot as well as artists like Donald Judd and the ever-present Duchamp, form the reference lexi-cal universe of the artist.

João Louro studied architecture at the University of Lisbon and paint-ing at the Ar.Co School of Visual Art. His work has been exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions, galeries and biennials, including the Serralves Museum, Porto; Cultural Centre of Belém, Lisbon; Foundation Joan Miró, MACRO–Contemporary Art Museum Rome, to name but a few. He is pre-sent in various public and private collections around the world.

Louro was the portuguese representative at the Venice Biennale of 2015, with the exhibition I Will Be Your Mirror | Poems and Problems.

Untitled, 2019Iron, mirror and glass120 × 80 x 80 cm

José Pedro Croft

Untitled, 2019Iron and glass265 × 200 x 170 cm

José Pedro Croft

Untitled, 2018Gouache, synthetic varnich and Indian ink70 x 100 cm

José Pedro Croft

José Pedro CroftOporto, 1957

Lives and works in Lisbon. José Pedro Croft is one of the most important Portuguese artists and

one of the main protagonists of the renewal of sculpture which took place throughout the eighties in Portugal. Croft's sculptures engage in complex dialogues with the space and the context surrounding them but also, and probably more importantly, with the shapes and volumes defining them as tangible objects. Very simple structures, minimal, one could say, com-bining formal aspects with the material nature of objects, often made more present through the use of bright colors and industrial paint, hint at a relationship between sculpture and painting that goes beyond pre-conceived and historically tight ideas about these two fields of practice.

He studied painting at ESBAL (University of Fine Arts in Lisbon) and sculpture with João Cutileiro. His work ranges from sculpture to draw-ing and etching without hierarchies. He exhibits regularly since 1980. His work is represented in the following collections: Centro de Artes Visuales Fundación Helga de Alvear (Spain), Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal), Fundação EDP (Portugal), Fundação Luso-Americana (Portugal)Fundação de Serralves (Portugal), Secretaria de Estado da Cultura (Portugal), Fundació La Caixa (Spain), Caixa Geral de Depósitos (Portugal), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain), Museu Berardo (Portugal), Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Pinacoteca do Estado De São Paulo (Brazil), Caja Madrid (Spain), Canco de Espanha (Spain), European Central Bank, sampling Albertina (Austria), Centre Georges Pompidou (France).

Jose Pedro Croft represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale 2017.

Current show by João Louro at Galeria Vera Cortês

Exhibition view: Lindbergh's Fly, João Louro, Galeria Vera Cortês, Lisbon, 2019. Photo Bruno Lopes Link to exhibition pdf

Artists' ongoing exhibitons during ARCOmadrid 2019

João Louro (solo)Linguistic Ground ZeroMAAT, Lisbon07 November 2018 - 22 April 2019

Gonçalo Barreiros (group)WaitMuseu Colecçao Berardo, Lisbon30 January – 28 April 2019

Gabriela Albergaria (group)Construyendo historias. Colección de la Fundación Coca-ColaSala de Exposiciones Lonja del Pescado and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Alicante (MACA)5 February – 8 April 2019

Artists' ongoing exhibitons during ARCOmadrid 2019

Joana Escoval (solo)Fiorucci Art Trust, LondonJanuary - December 2019

José Pedro Croft (group) Corpo, abstração e linguagem na arte portuguesaObras da Secretaria de Estado da Cultura em Depósito na Coleção de Serralves, Forum Arte Braga23 January – 24 March 2019

Alexandre Farto aka Vhils (solo)IncisãoCaixa Cultural, Brasilia, Brazil13 January – 3 March 2019

R. João Saraiva 16, 1st | 1700-250 Lisbon, PT | T (+351) 213 950 177 | www.veracortes.com

GALERIA VERA CORTÊS