Julião Sarmento: la chose, même - the real thing

Curator: Ami Barak

The exhibition la chose, même - the real thing offers a panorama of the work of Julião Sarmento, a major figure of contemporary Portuguese art whose career was international from the outset. The artist began working at the end of the 1970s, when freedom had reemerged due to the end of the Salazar dictatorship. Over the years, Julião Sarmento developed a highly diverse body of work, ranging from photography and video to drawing, sculpture, and performance, while maintaining a close connection with text, which he incorporates and assembles in fragments. Among the key characteristics throughout his work is the iconic presence of women as subtle muses and recurring enigmatic motifs. Julião Sarmento’s suggestive work questions the themes of representation, particularly in relation to desire and its mechanisms. The spectator necessarily becomes a voyeur of a contingent hypothetical vision and is easily touched by the artist’s implicit views.

Born in 1948 in Lisbon, Julião Sarmento studied painting and architecture at the Fine Arts School in Lisbon before embarking on an international career in the 1970s. His work has been widely exhibited, such as at Documenta in Kassel in 1982 and 1987; he represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and then took part in the São Paulo Biennale in 2002. More recently, Tate Modern in London devoted an “Artist Room” to him, and his work was shown at the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo in Malaga, and the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati in 2011. In 2012, the Fundação Serralves in Porto organised a major retrospective, and the first retrospective of his work in France was in 2014 at the MAMAC in Nice. His work is in approximately 70 international collections including the Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York.

Marie. Julião Sarmento (in collaboration with Felipe Oliveira Baptista)
March 31, 6:30pm
Public unveiling of Marie, Julião Sarmento’s installation for the outdoor courtyard, in collaboration with Felipe Oliveira Baptista.