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.

 

 

 

 

 

Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain

Jardim Infinito

 

Visit the Online Viewing Room

20 March – 3 May 2025

 

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

 

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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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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331 AMOREIRAS EM METAMORFOSE

Curated by Nuno Faria

 

Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva

 

 

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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.

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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On view:

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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Solo exhibition

 

Susanne S. D. Themlitz

The Language of Silent Things

Curated by Miguel Fernández-Cid

 

MARCO – Museu de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo

 

Visit the online viewing room

8 November 2024 – 13 April 2025

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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Current exhibition at the gallery

Joana Escoval

Tones of the Spine

 

Check the Online Viewing Room 

On view until 21 June