Collectors António Saint Silvestre and Richard Treger will be recognized with the Municipal Medal of Merit in Gold, awarded by the São João da Madeira City Council, for the “invaluable” contribution they made to the city in culture and art.
The award ceremony will take place during the official celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Oliva Art Center, which takes place on the 21st and 22nd of October, with the presence of the Minister of Culture, Pedro Adão e Silva.
At the Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis, Portreto de la Animo is on display to the public, an exhibition of portraits and self-portraits that are part of the Treger Saint Silvestre collection, one of the most important and extensive private collections of Brute Art in the world.
António Saint Silvestre, painter and collector, curates the exhibition. With the musician and gallerist Richard Treger, he began the creation of the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection in the 1980s, the fundamental subject of this exhibition.
Richard Treger and António Saint Silvestre began their collection inspired by the path started by Jean Dubuffet, a pioneer in collecting artistic productions that become reports of the unconscious.
The collection is made up of approximately 1700 works by 350 artists, reflecting the evolution of different historical moments and ramifications of marginal arts to the circuits of the established artistic system, from the classics of Art Brut to its variants.
The collection is particularly distinguished by its great chronological range, demarcated by artists born at the end of the 19th century to authors active today. It also stands out for its broad geographical representation, which covers the traditional “centers of raw art” in Western Europe and North America, expanding to artists from Africa, Asia, Eastern, Central and Southern Europe and Central Latin America. , highlighting the diversity of Portuguese and Brazilian artists.
The works that make up the collection cover a wide variety of techniques and materials, including painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, tapestry, photography, electrical mechanisms, recovered objects and atypical materials such as organic materials.
Presented for the first time in Portugal in 2012, at the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation, the collection has been in long-term storage at the Centro de Arte Oliva (São João da Madeira) since 2014.