ARCOlisboa 2026

Booth F05

Cordoaria Nacional, Lisboa

28 – 31 May

Ana Vieira

Armanda Duarte

André Romão

João Louro

João Pimenta Gomes

Susanne S. D. Themlitz

In this year’s edition of ARCOlisboa, GALERIA VERA CORTÊS presents a selection that also marks the recent representation of the Estate of Ana Vieira by the gallery, whose first exhibition with Galeria Vera Cortês The Narrative Structure opens 26 May. Through sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, and image, the presentation brings together distinct artistic practices that explore domesticity, memory, the body, and the poetics of inhabited space, offering a multifaceted overview of the gallery’s program.

ANA VIEIRA 

Ana Vieira was born in Coimbra in 1940, spent her childhood and early years on the island of São Miguel in the Azores, and lived most of her adult life in Lisbon, where she died in 2016. She graduated in Painting from the School of Fine Arts (1966) and was awarded the AICA Prize in 1991.

Ana Vieira started exhibiting her work regularly in the late 1960s and established herself as one of the key figures of Portuguese contemporary art in the decades that followed. Anchored in a critical thinking and an artistic language that explores the limits and the traditional supports of art, particularly painting and sculpture, her practice aligns with the conceptual art movement and is markedly influenced by the exploration of everyday objects, spaces, and situations. Often in the form of installations, Vieira plays with representations of passages, half-spaces and transparencies, creating hybrid territories simultaneously visible and inaccessible, welcoming and hostile. These scenic creations allow for different possibilities for the experiencing of objects, freeing them from their function and inscribing them in a poetic dimension that lies between allegory and simulacrum.

Ana Vieira’s work is held in the collections of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation – Modern Art Center (CAM), Serralves Museum, Culturgest, the State Contemporary Art Collection (CACE), the Contemporary Art Museum – Belém Cultural Center (MAC/CCB), the EDP Foundation, the Carmona e Costa Foundation, and the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, among others.

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Scientific Advisory Board for the Study of the Estate of Ana Vieira: Antonia Gaeta, Astrid Suzano and Sofia Gomes.

Current  group show:

Rosa Barba. Drawing Vocabularies

Gulbenkian Foundation’s Modern Art Center, Lisbon

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Upcoming  solo show at the gallery:

The Narrative Structure

Galeria Vera Cortês

Opening 26 May

ARMANDA DUARTE

Armanda Duarte (1961), studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, in Lisbon, where she lives and works. Armanda Duarte’s work is site-specific to such a degree that her proposals are actually determined by her observation and analysis of each given space.

She observes the characteristics and details of each context in search of the essence which will lead the process of creation up to the work’s final reception. Her spatial poetics, which involve drawing, sculpture, installation and architecture, provoke subtle and intimate experiences.

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“Fifteen glass tiles taken from the mosaic room at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the start of my academic training, and which for years lay forgotten and locked away inside a box, serve as the inspiration for the drawing I have named ‘minus fifteen’.

This drawing is, in turn, composed of four drawings (or moments): princípio ou origem, primeiro meio, segundo meio e fim ou sombra dobrada e guardada provisoriamente.

From the model, or origin, a process of presentation, representation and transformation begins which, drawing on simple and elementary relationships of enlargement, addition and subtraction, ends in what I call the shadow, folded and temporarily stored.”

ANDRÉ ROMÃO 

André Romão was born in Lisbon in 1984, where he lives. His work mostly assumes the form of sculpture and poetry exploring ideas of transformation, mutation and fluidity. Taking emotion and intuition as building blocks his dream-like figures and landscapes often occupy a blurry field between the literary and the natural realms.

His work has been featured in institutions such as Serralves Museum (Porto), Centre d’art Contemporain Genève, Liverpool Biennial 2021, MAAT (Lisbon), Berardo Museum (Lisbon), Futura (Prague), The Green Parrot (Barcelona), Macro (Rome), Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo), CAPC (Bordeaux), Spike Island (Bristol), Kunsthalle Lissabon, among others.

He was the recipient of Prémio EDP Novos Artistas in 2007 and BES revelação in 2013. And was a resident artist in Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2010), MACRO, Rome (2014) and Gasworks, London (2020), among others.

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Weeping willow (2026) continues Romão’s exploration of metamorphosis, fluidity and the lack of fixed frontiers between entities. Leafs appear to sprout from a terracotta sculptural fragment as an outwards manifestation of internal flows and energies. The tension between animated and lifeless continues on the oxidation of the brass leafs emphasizing this sense of perpetual mutation of life.

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.

He was the Portuguese representative at the Venice Biennale of 2015, with the exhibition “I Will Be Your Mirror | Poems and Problems”.

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These works form part of a core aspect of my practice relating to language. It is the “limits of language that define my world” (Wittgenstein) and, in the case of these works, they arise from the layers of meaning that language gradually builds up—from reflections and epiphanies, the construction of thought, and encounters with authors and books—all of which await their moment to emerge in the works I have been developing. Whether through unexpected combinations or through the waiting that compels them to emerge, all these texts are “surgeings” that alight upon the remnants of urban structures. It is in the signage and abandoned design, laden with time, still bearing traces of its former function, that—when transformed into supports, into surfaces for inscription—they produce the closure and order of the text’s syntax.

Upcoming duo show

Músculo Mental

Fundação Vasco Vieira de Almeida

Opening 27 May

JOÃO PIMENTA GOMES

“In 1999, as my life as a dreamer musician began, I came across a receipt for a guitar bought by Jimi Hendrix in New York. Maybe it may seem obvious, but for me it was a miraculous realization: one day Jimi Hendrix woke up and went to a music store and bought a guitar, at the same time an object and a treasure, something to hold, travel with, and pass time with.

The relationship with music, or maybe I should say my relationship with music, is always connected with desire. Desire for a new piece of equipment, for a record that holds precious information on its sleeve, desire for a sound that I have never made. Ultimately, it’s a utopia. There is no arriving place. Glenn Gould’s chair, built by his father for him and altered frequently so it was perfect, represents to me all of that. A utilitarian object, an amulet, a sound maker that can be heard forever on records, and maybe more importantly, a history of love.”

Current group show

Ultratremor

Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado – MNAC, Lisbon, Portugal

On view until 27 September

SUSANNE S D. THEMLITZ 

Susanne S. D. Themlitz (Lisbon, 1968) is an artist of Portuguese and German nationality who lives and works in Lisbon, Sintra, and Cologne. Between 1987 and 1995, she studied drawing and sculpture at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual in Lisbon, studied at the Royal College of Art in London, and completed a master’s degree in visual arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She has exhibited regularly since 1998 and is represented in several institutional and private collections. Over the years, her work developed into a poetic universe of great symbolism, in constant dialogue with art history, literature, natural sciences, popular traditions, and children’s stories. These references seldom become explicit in the imaginary landscapes and hybrid figures with which Themlitz creates environments of silent theatricality that summon the viewer, turned into an active participant in scenes where the visible and the hinted dialogue and enhance each other in the space of imagination and fiction.

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Among Beings is the title chosen by Susanne S. D. Themlitz for a collection of twenty-six new works she has brought together in a grey archival box. They invoke all the hybrid creatures that inhabit her work, whose form and essence are shaped by the assemblage of various unrelated elements: uncanny fragments of architecture or furniture become the bodies of animals, identified by heads made of latex masks; empty clothes topped with terracotta faces recall ghostly human figures; found objects are combined with bronze elements crafted by the artist; and human faces sometimes also appear in the middle of a brushstroke while others are the result of bringing together magazine cutouts.

This diverse community of beings congregates in two and three-dimensional poetic and surreal landscapes she articulates in a similar fashion, whether on a canvas, a piece of paper, or in the space of the exhibition; mixing and collaging drawings, paintings, found objects and sculpture. She combines elements that are clearly not related in scale, resulting in distortions that seems to question the very notion of perspective as a hierarchic order. In that sense, there is something almost medieval in her compositions.

This collection of pieces maps out Themlitz’s mental landscape: drawings, altered photographs and collages reveal her working process and exemplify the body of work in two and three dimensions she has produced over the past three decades. This box could therefore be regarded as a glossary of themes and forms that have structured her work, mixing references to animals, humans, plants, inanimate objects or abstract forms, and the way they form a whole. While most works in this compilation are mechanically produced via different printing techniques, Themlitz also chose to insert “real” drawings, thereby questioning the value of an “original”.

– Benjamin Weil

Current solo show

Entre Seres 

Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência

On view until 7 June

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Upcoming show

Landart Cascais 2026

Quinta do Pisão, Parque Natural Sintra-Cascais

Opening 30 May

Join us at Booth F05

Cordoria Nacional

28 – 31 May 2026