'Álvaro Lapa: some drawings and paintings'
18 December 2015 to 21 February 2016
Power Station building
Curated by João Pinharanda, this exhibition displays a small number of works by Portuguese artist Álvaro Lapa: a set of paintings and drawings, some of which in complete series, created between the 1970s and 1990s. Some of these are being showcased for the first time, while others have not been exhibited in a long time.
Enjoying cult status among Portuguese artists, Lapa explores three famous literary references in these works: Milarepa, Sade and Freud. Milarepa, a Tibetan monk who has freed himself from the world, from pleasure, pain, good and evil through meditation; Sade, who overcame all limitations on political, social and sexual freedoms; and Freud, who attempted to rationalise the workings of the subconscious mind by placing sex at the centre of human behaviour.
“This exhibition gathers some paintings and some series of drawings which confront us with word and image, with death and sex, with the freedom of doing and the submission of looking, with violence and emptiness, with the grandeur of the idea and the inadequacy of matter. This body of work opens up our understanding to Lapa’s uncompromising and exasperated spirit.”
João Pinharanda
THE ARTIST
Álvaro Lapa was born in Évora in 1939. His first contact with painting was in António Charrua’s drawing classes. He moves to Lisbon in 1956, where he first goes to Law School and, later, switches to Philosophy, which he finishes in 1975. His first trip abroad was to Paris, in June 1961, where he connects with painters of the surrealist and North-American movements. He has maintained parallel careers in painting and writing, with frequent crossovers. His literary work includes Art Theory, as well as poetry and short surrealist stories. The recognition of his work is attested by exhibitions in the Serralves and Calouste Gulbenkian foundations.
He was awarded the EDP Foundation Art Grand Prize in 2004.
