ARCOlisboa 2025

Booth F04

Cordoaria Nacional, Lisbon, Portugal

29 May – 1 June

Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain

Carlos Bunga

Gabriela Albergaria

João Louro

Susanne S. D. Themlitz

John Wood & Paul Harrison

GALERIA VERA CORTÊS is participating in ARCOlisboa 2025 and we are delighted to share a selection of recent and new works by Angela Detanico /Rafael Lain, Carlos Bunga, Gabriela Albergaria, João Louro, Susanne S. D. Themlitz, and John Wood & Paul Harrison.

ANGELA DETANICO / RAFAEL LAIN

Angela Detanico (1974) and Rafael Lain (1973) are Brazilian artists living and working in Paris.

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain have been working together for nearly twenty years. They quickly established themselves within the international art scene thanks to their subtle questioning of the modes of conventional representation that surround us. Fascinated by what exceeds man and his understanding of the world, they draw systems of representation and writing of time, space, memory and the infinite from scientific, mathematical and literary research. Inherited from the conceptual statement, established in the use of new mediums of sound, graphic and plastic creation, their thought process appears in a meticulous, uncluttered and poetic formalism. Linguist/semiologist and graphic designer respectively, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain question the use of graphic signs in society.

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The book On the Infinite Universe and the Worlds, published by Giordano Bruno in 1584, introduces the idea of infinity in the cosmological conception of the universe. Each painting reproduces a page from Bruno’s book with the letters i f n t o illuminated by white, spreading the word infinity in the space.

Life is a code as well as living is reading. Sentient life forms realised there was a universe to decipher and developed language to explore it. Reading came before writing, as the stars tell us. The sky was the first book where ancient civilisations read stories connecting the bright dots in constellations.

Letters distributed like stars in space spell out the names of the constellations.

Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain

Jardim Infinito

Solo exhibition at Galeria Vera Cortês

20 March – 3 May 2025

Visit the Online Viewing Room

The design of the classic posters created by Josef Müller-Brockmann for the Musica Viva Festival in Zürich between the 1960s and 1970s is transformed with the circular characters of Helvetica Concentrated, created by the artists. The concentration of the surface of the letters in dots of ink translates the reading of the posters into a rhythmic experience.

CARLOS BUNGA 

Carlos Bunga (b. 1976 Porto) attended the Escola Superior de Arte e Design in Caldas da Rainha, in Portugal. He currently lives and works near Barcelona.

He creates process-oriented works in various formats: sculptures, paintings, drawings, performances, video, and above all in situ installations, that refer to and intervene in their immediate architectural surroundings. While often using ordinary, unassuming materials such as packing cardboard and adhesive tape, Bunga’s work involves a highly developed degree of aesthetic care and delicacy, as well as a conceptual complexity derived from the inter-relationship between doing and undoing, between unmaking and remaking, between the micro and the macro, between investigation and conclusion.

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The series ‘Construcción pictórica’ are windows that at the same time have a relation with the skin of the building. Made with painted cardboard and wood, offer a deceivingly sophisticated level of production. Under closer inspection, the execution contrasts with the mundanity of the material; yet this calls attention to our own presumptions about stability, craft and permanence – steering us to consider, more generally, the many things around us that can suddenly deteriorate or escape us.

Also on view during ARCOlisboa:

I Ate Civilization and It Poisoned Me

Amélia de Mello Foundation Gallery

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GABRIELA ALBERGARIA

Gabriela Albergaria’s work involves one territory: Nature. A nature manipulated, 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 representation systems they generate different versions of what we see as landscape—itself a complex system of material structures and visual hierarchies, cultural constructs that define the framing of our visual field.

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This piece brings together various elements that belong to a lexicon developed in recent years and which are installed in a grid drawn on the wall with cotton threads. Trying to create relationships and phrases.
Based on the idea “From Dirt to Soil”, I’ve put together several pieces that try to reflect on these issues of the relationship between human beings and nature and the meaning of metamorphosis and transformation, recovery.

For Gabriela Albergaria “drawing is not only a means to look, but also a way to embody what is seen (by herself or her digital camera) and, to evaluate her colour palette, and her materials which are mostly (although not all because we are all participants in climate erosion), if not compostable, biodegradable.

Moreover, her drawings of trees, usually collaged with photographs, now incorporate monochromatic strips, whose brown and green hues denote her more recent preoccupation with the nature, quality, and depletion of soils.”

 – Joana P. R. Neves, in the curatorial text  for Desperdícios, Gabriela Albergaria’s solo exhibition at the gallery, 2023

Also on view during ARCOlisboa:

331 AMOREIRAS EM METAMORFOSE

Curated by Nuno Faria

Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva

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Ouro Branco 

Pavilhões da Mitra, Beco da Mitra, Lisbon

On view until 28 July

JOÃO LOURO

João Louro was born in 1963, in Lisbon, where he lives and works. He studied architecture at the University of Lisbon and painting at the Ar.Co School of Visual Art. João Louro’s body of work encompasses painting, sculpture, photography and video.

João Louro’s work descends from minimal and conceptual art, with special attention to avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. 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 contemporary culture, starting out from a set of representations and symbols 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 lexical universe  of the artist.

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In the series Blind Images the viewer is faced with a canvas on which the image has been blanked out, hidden beneath a coating of glossy acrylic and a glass panel that produces the effect of a mirror. At the bottom of the canvas there is a text alluding to or descriptive of the cancelled image, thus provoking different approaches to what is visible or varying perspectives through which one can consider the image; helping us to understand that the gap between words and images is not as great as that which exists between words and objects, or between culture and nature.

At its origin this series has the ceaseless saturation of images we undergo nowadays. Louro states that this is due to the “erosion of the word, in which the signified ceases to coincide with the signifier…. The word is a fine skin that has lost its contents.

“[I]n “From Left to Right #16” (2022), [we see] a painting that references a book documenting the testing of the first atomic bomb. The left panel of the work resembles a kind of mediated neo-gestural abstraction that might connote isotopes or radioactive fallout. Louro paints on the back of Plexiglas and then scrapes away the pigment, so that we are seeing the paint on the other side of the Plexiglas, which we perceive, somewhat paradoxically, as the front of the painting. At the bottom of the left panel, Louro has transposed the original image caption from the book, which reads: “BASE CAMP TRINITY TEST: A portion of the Alamogordo Bombing Range was chosen as the site for the Trinity Test. This section of the test site was located at McDonald Ranch (RIGHT).” When we look to the right side of the painting/page, there is only a white monochrome, a void, a double obliteration: the image of the bomb test has been subtracted (literally through the removal of paint and the removal of imagery), which in turn allegorizes the destruction wrought by the bomb itself.” – Joshua Decter, 2022.

Also on view during ARCOlisboa:

I Ate Civilization and It Poisoned Me

Amélia de Mello Foundation Gallery

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SUSANNE S. D. THEMLITZ

Susanne S. D. Themlitz (Lisbon, 1968) lives and works in Cologne and Lisbon. She studied Visual Arts Studies between 1987 and 1995 at Ar.Co. (Lisbon), the Royal College of Art (London) and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

In Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s work, drawing is a practice intimately connected to the development of idiosyncratic mechanisms between thought and imagination, therefore, it’s a medium that allows her to explore and feed processes of oddity. Each drawing assumes a cut with the exterior. The off-field doesn’t exist. Everything is inside, in this inner world, with its singular meteorology and with the unique capacity of gathering forces, energies and vibrations that distinguish it as a peculiar reality.

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Also on view during ARCOlisboa: 

Partida… (On your marks…) Em Torno da Coleção da CGD

Curated by Hugo Dinis

MU.SA Museu das Artes de Sintra

On view until 31 August 2025

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Book launch:

A linguaxe das cousas mudas is the new catalog by Susanne S. D. Themlitz, giving continuity to the exhibition with the same title presented at MARCO, Museu de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo.

The launch will take place on May 31 at 6:30 PM at the ARCOlisboa Forum, located in Cordoaria Nacional with the presence of the artist Susanne S. D. Themlitz, curator Antonia Gaeta, and Miguel Fernández-Cid, director of MARCO de Vigo and exhibition curator.

Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s solo exhibition

The Language of Silent Things

Curated by Miguel Fernández-Cid

MARCO – Museu de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo

Visit the online viewing room

JOHN WOOD & PAUL HARRISON

John Wood (b.1969, Hong Kong) and Paul Harrison (b.1966, Wolverhampton) have been collaborating since 1991 and produced their first work Board in 1993. They explore how we interact with the world around us, highlighting the ordinary, the absurd and the accidental.

Wood and Harrison are fascinated by architecture and design and how we engage with our environment in unintended ways. They explore the human tendency to improvise or mess things up, arguably in a good way. Their works form a kind of reference manual for how to do, make, build, or draw things that you probably never want to do, make, build, or draw. They do it for you, even though you didn’t ask them to.

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John Wood and Paul Harrison make things that move and things that don’t, things that are flat and things that are not, things that are mildly amusing and things that are definitely not.

They make works that form a kind of reference manual for how to do, make, build, or draw things that you probably never want to do, make, build, or draw. They do it for you. Even though you don’t need them to.

Programme during the fair 

31 May

At the gallery from 10 AM – 12 PM

Book launch

André Romão ‘André Romão — Sculptures. Vol. 2: 2015–2025’ edited by Kunsthalle Lissabon

Artist-led tour

with Joana Escoval, Tones of the Spine

At ARCOlisboa – 6:30 PM

Book launch

Susanne S. D. Themlitz ‘A linguaxe das cousas mudas’ edited by MARCO de Vigo will be launched on May 31 at 6:30 PM at the ARCOlisboa Forum with the presence of the artist,  curator Antonia Gaeta, and Miguel Fernández-Cid, director of MARCO de Vigo and exhibition curator.

Don’t miss out on the current exhibition at the gallery

Joana Escoval

Tones of the Spine

On view until 21 June