The Soares dos Reis National Museum is opening two new temporary exhibitions on 25 January 2024: Teresa Gonçalves Lobo and Domingos Sequeira: a dialogue in time and Landscape by José Zagalo Ilharco.
The Museum has been sharing its collections with contemporary artists, challenging them to new perspectives and sometimes unexpected dialogues. This is the case with the exhibition of drawings by Teresa Gonçalves Lobo, which curator Bernardo Pinto de Almeida fits “into this programme, which focuses on a review of the artworks in the Soares dos Reis National Museum’s collection, placing Teresa Gonçalves Lobo’s drawings in a dialogue with works by Domingos Sequeira, the great Portuguese artist of the transition from the 18th to the 19th century.”
According to the curator, “the suggestion behind Sequeira’s choice to open a dialogue with the works of Teresa Gonçalves Lobo was to find in the work of both a similar sense of the plastic and metamorphic invention of drawing which, clearly experienced on its expressive plane, emphasises the possibility of spreading out over surfaces, making the choreography of countless lines vibrate as a way of suggesting the presence of forms which, although unrecognisable in a figurative mode, nevertheless function as forms of a figuration.”
Teresa Gonçalves Lobo (Funchal, 1968), whose work began more than two decades ago, focused from the start on drawing as an expressive field where she has developed remarkable research. She is represented in various private and institutional collections in Portugal and abroad.
Domingos Sequeira (Lisbon, 1768 – Rome, 1837), considered by some to be the most talented and original Portuguese painter of his time, played a fundamental role in the development of Portuguese art in the early 19th century.
In the dialogue that supports this exhibition, we can see how a similar approach to drawing and the way of scratching occurs in the works of both artists, despite the long distance in time that separates them, but whose purpose of giving birth to the form of this use of risk brings them closer together.
Also on 25 January, the Museum opens the exhibition Landscape by José Zagalo Ilharco.