Memory issues have been the subject of João Paulo Serafim’s research. Since 2005, he has been developing the project MIIAC-Museu Improvável Imagem e Arte Contemporânea, in which – through photography and bibliography – he combines personal and collective memories.

Throughout 2024, in an artist’s residency at the Soares dos Reis National Museum, João Paulo Serafim explores the basic themes of his work in a process that he has entitled Close Memory. The result of this residency is presented in the form of an exhibition at the Soares dos Reis National Museum, from September 12 to November 16. Free entry.

The exhibition Siza, Baroque Chamber opens at the Soares dos Reis National Museum on September 12 at 6 p.m., with free admission.

Open to the public until December 31, the exhibition is the result of the “Siza Barroco” project – ranked first in the competition launched in 2021 by the Foundation for Science and Technology, for IC&DT projects in the field of Álvaro Siza’s architecture – and concludes the research carried out over the last three years at the Center for Architecture and Urbanism Studies of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (CEAU/FAUP).

Siza, Baroque Chamber is an exhibition that brings together 18 works by the architect Álvaro Siza, covering different periods of his work, studied by a team of researchers, coordinated by José Miguel Rodrigues (Head Researcher of the ‘Siza Barroco’ project and current director of the Research Center) and Joana Couceiro (Integrated Researcher and co-responsible for the project), both curators of the exhibition with Constança Pupo Cardoso (Designer and assistant curator of the exhibition).

The works by Álvaro Siza selected for this exhibition show the affinity that the author’s compositions have established with the “Idea of Baroque” from an early age, focusing on works begun in the 1970s and 1980s, according to the researchers, the most ideologically baroque.

The Soares dos Reis National Museum presents the exhibition De Passagem, Moçambique 1970-1973, by Mário Martins, an extension in Porto of Encontros da Imagem – International Photography and Visual Arts Festival, with programming by The Cave Photography, and curated by Mafalda Martins, Miguel Refresco, Rui Pinheiro and Sérgio Correia.

Mário Martins was born in Vila Real on 25 June 1948. Like thousands of young Portuguese men, he was called up for the Colonial War in 1970, mobilised against his will. He was a soldier In Mozambique within an independent military commission, operating in Niassa, Zambezia and Tete. From there he brought the experiences presented in this exhibition, which reveal his social concern in a war he considered senseless and which strengthened his affinity with the Portuguese liberation movement of 25 April 1974. This universal language of photography has always seduced him, but it was only in Mozambique that he became deeply involved in its practice.

A gaze upon the gaze, revisiting a personal archive of original photographs, printed over 50 years ago, is the proposal presented at the Soares dos Reis National Museum. A wandering narrative that contains parts of an organised, commented and partially closed collection, which includes elements of the photographic practice, printing experiments, technical notes and chemical and physical processes. Images that transcend the date they were taken, revealing the underlying reason that precedes them, somewhere between the exercise of contestation and the act of survival. 50 years after the April Revolution, the possibility of scrutinising the Colonial War from multiple perspectives, in an intrinsic dialogue between memory and contemporaneity that transposes linear history and opens it up to new understandings.

Landscape is an exhibition made up of a selection of photographs from the family archive of José Zagalo Ilharco, an amateur photographer who left a significant oeuvre, few of which are known, in a valuable testimony to the landscapes of Portugal at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

José Zagalo Ilharco (Lamego, 1860 – Porto, 1910), an amateur photographer who won an international award for his image of the Souza River, devoted himself primarily to landscape photography, but also to the anthropology of spaces, an example of which are the images now unveiled of Porto and Matosinhos.

The reproductions of the best images he produced were put together in an album by his son Norberto de Melo Zagalo Ilharco in two volumes (1947) and, being the property of his heirs, are being made public in recognition of his legacy.

The selection presented at the Soares dos Reis National Museum includes, among originals and reproductions, mainly landscapes of Matosinhos, Leça da Palmeira, Porto and the Douro.

The exhibition is the result of the contest for the pluriannual project ‘Afinidades’, developed by the Soares dos Reis National Museum, in partnership with the Quarteirão Criativo Association, with the patronage support of the Super Bock Group, as well as the support of the Círculo Dr José de Figueiredo – Friends of the Soares dos Reis National Museum.

From 6 July to 16 November, the exhibition presents jewellery pieces made by jewellers and artists from different disciplines, represented in the Bombarda Quarter, inspired by the sculpture and two preparatory drawings of ‘Firmino’, by António Soares dos Reis and belonging to the museum’s collection.

Ana Pina, Andreia Reimão, Benedetta Grasso, Carla Faro Barros, Diogo Dalloz, Joana Santos, Luís Mendonça, Luma Boêta, Margarida Valente, Maria João Portal, Mina Gallos, Monica Faverio, Noemí Díaz Patiño, Paula Castro, Paulo Azevedo, Sílvia Pinto Costa, Susana Barbosa and Telma Pinto de Oliveira, are the authors of the proposals that will be voted on by visitors to the exhibition and by a jury, through which a winning piece will be chosen and integrated into the Museum Shop.

From 1976 to 1980, the Contemporary Art Centre promoted around 100 exhibitions and various cultural activities. Alberto Carneiro, Ângelo de Sousa, Álvaro Lapa, Júlio Pomar, Emília Nadal, Eduardo Nery, among many others, showed their artworks in anthological form for the first time in Porto.

The intense dynamism of the programme was only possible thanks to the establishment of partnerships with embassies, foreign cultural institutes and institutions, which made it possible to present important contemporary art exhibitions on national and international tour in Porto.

Curated by Miguel von Hafe Pérez, the exhibition ‘Centro de Arte Contemporânea – 50 years, Making Art Democratic’ revisits the story of this primordial adventure in the Portuguese institutional context, recreating some of its exhibition moments and bringing to light rarely seen graphic documents.

As part of the official programme for the 50th Anniversary of 25 April, the exhibition will be on display at the Soares dos Reis National Museum until the end of 2024, with the patronage support of BPI and ‘la Caixa’ Foundation, and the institutional support of Círculo Dr. José de Figueiredo – Friends of the Museum.

The sound installation ECO ( ) LAPSO, by Henrique Fernandes/ Sonoscopia, establishes a dialogue between the plaster sculpture L’ Echo! (1915), by Maria da Glória Ribeiro (Porto 1891-1989), a work from the Soares dos Reis National Museum collection, and a musical composition produced from sound recordings and archive material related to the 25 April revolution.

This sculpture explores ECHO in juxtaposition with LAPSO, auditory perception and communication phenomena. The experience, from an aesthetic and sensory perspective, presents elements suggesting individualized listening to the present, based on a relationship of resonant connection with time-memory.

ECO ( ) LAPSO is a site-specific sound installation, consisting of a set of artwork transportation boxes displayed throughout the exhibition space and transformed into an electro-acoustic device.

In addition to the sound material from various audio recordings of 25 April 1974, Sonoscopia and a wide range of artists made field recordings throughout Portugal 50 years later, in order to create a sound map, making a temporal counterpoint.

The exhibition covers the theme of ‘zaffre blue’ earthenware, so called because of the shade of color of its glaze, produced at the Miragaia Factory in Porto and dating from 1775 to 1822.

The museological organization of the exhibition promotes the relationship between this collection and other decorative arts collections at the Soares dos Reis National Museum, which precede the modern concept of design, valuing its contextualization and interpretation with approaches to history and European plastic arts, namely Painting, Drawing and Engraving.

The exhibition and its guide are intended to increase the visibility and knowledge of the ceramics collection at the Soares dos Reis National Museum, one of the most important ceramics collections held by Portuguese national museums, establishing the relationship between the influences of English culture on the production of the Miragaia Factory.

The Soares dos Reis National Museum preserves a collection of around 180 pieces from the Miragaia Factory, resulting from different incorporations.

The exhibition will be open until June 23, 2024, with the patronage of AOF-Augusto Oliveira Ferreira and Lusitânia Seguros, as well as the support of Círculo Dr. José de Figueiredo – Amigos do Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis.

The Soares dos Reis National Museum has been sharing its collections with contemporary artists, challenging them to new perspectives and 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 objects in the Soares dos Reis National Museum’s collection, integrating Teresa Gonçalves Lobo’s drawings into 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 reason for choosing Sequeira to open a dialogue with Teresa Gonçalves Lobo’s works was that he found in both their works the same sense of the plastic and metamorphic invention of drawing which, clearly experienced in its expressive plane, accentuates 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 early 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 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 is the basis of 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 scratching brings them closer together.

Landscape is an exhibition made up of a selection of photographs from the family archive of José Zagalo Ilharco, an amateur photographer who left a significant oeuvre, few of which are known, in a valuable testimony to the landscapes of Portugal at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

José Zagalo Ilharco (Lamego, 1860 – Porto, 1910), an amateur photographer who won an international award for his image of the Souza River, devoted himself primarily to landscape photography, but also to the anthropology of spaces, an example of which are the images now unveiled of Porto and Matosinhos.

The reproductions of the best images he produced were put together in an album by his son Norberto de Melo Zagalo Ilharco in two volumes (1947) and, being the property of his heirs, are being made public in recognition of his legacy.

The selection presented at the Soares dos Reis National Museum includes, among originals and reproductions, mainly landscapes of Matosinhos, Leça da Palmeira, Porto and the Douro.

Also noteworthy among the images presented is a group of photographs taken in 1893 of the Maria Amélia velodrome, produced before its inauguration at the back of the Royal Palace of Porto, where the Soares dos Reis National Museum is currently located.

The exhibition will also include a copy of the magazine O Tripeiro (May 1946), signed with a dedication by Vasco Valente, in which an article by the then Director of the Soares dos Reis National Museum is published about the Real Velo Club do Porto, of which José Zagalo Ilharco was a founding member.

The installation presents the nine infernal circles, each representing different stories and concepts in an eternal cycle of experiences and rebirth. A metaphor for human life, with a beginning, complexity and a point of arrival that is also a new beginning. The objective is to stimulate a unique moment of reflection and decision in the Lionesa Business Hub community.

This partnership between Soares dos Reis National Museum and the Lionesa Business Hub is the result of a patronage protocol that the Lionesa Group signed with the Museum and which went towards the requalification of rooms in the Palácio dos Carrancas. This initiative reinforces the orientation towards cultural democracy, awakening to the themes of well-being through art and culture.

The exhibition is free to access and will be open until Mars 2024. Everyday from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

With a history spanning almost 200 years, this exhibition begins a new era in the museum’s history. It is taking on a distinctive and critical repositioning that is manifested in a new look at its collections.

Aware of the demands of an increasingly proactive and knowledgeable society, it seeks to provide opportunities for new readings and new narratives, always valuing the cultural heritage it integrates and honoring the history of which it is heir.

This long-term exhibition thus allows a global view of the Soares dos Reis National Museum in a journey with two complementary narratives. The first reflects its history and the way in which the collections were integrated and the second values the artists and their works.

An invitation to appreciate the iconic works of all times and an opportunity to glimpse new discoveries in a unique space that belongs to everyone and for everyone.

What do we expect? To bring the Soares dos Reis National Museum closer to its history, assuming itself as a cultural and artistic institution of reference, with a collection of international dimension.

An essential place for knowledge, a special place for leisure, discovery, questioning, a place for people… come in, visit, see, observe, enjoy and… come back!

Sine Terra (variations in minor key) is a video installation by José Carlos Teixeira around the sculpture O Desterrado (The Exiled), by António Soares dos Reis, which explores concepts related to the falling, multiple and fragmented identity, exile and various types of displacement. The artist proposes a new gaze at the emotions that O Desterrado (The Exiled) conveys to visitors and simultaneously presents a poetic meditation and documentary piece around the sculpture produced in Rome 150 years ago by the Museum’s patron.

José Carlos Teixeira presents two tempi: a more objective and factual one in the framing of the sculpture in situ along with the research about Soares dos Reis, combined with a more subjective and essayistic tempo – of this project’s creation and composition, stemming from his own autobiographical motivations, as an author, visual artist, and emigrant/immigrant.

The soundtrack for the video installation is played on the harpsichord by Fernando Miguel Jalôto, with pieces by Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) and Vasco Negreiros (1965), and includes the recitation in Portuguese and English of poems by Portuguese and foreign authors such as Alexandre Herculano, author of the poem Tristezas do Desterro, which inspired Soares dos Reis to sculpt O Desterrado (The Exiled).

Aurélia’s houses, places where her painting lives, where, in the flow of days, looks, memories and idiosyncrasies intersect.Show a painting or photograph it. Appropriation. Distant reverence or passion, indifference or filial love, dilettantism or obsession, but always appropriation. Prolonging desire and restlessness, showing a painting, wherever and however we do it, requires a representation device, which, almost always by default, exposes and reveals us. In Aurélia’s homes there are many such “self-portraits”, insubmissive, indiscreet, treacherous at times, demanding the photographer’s attention and sensitivity at every step.

The photographic campaign carried out for Aurélia de Souza’s catalog raisonée, which will allow for a systematic inventory of all her work in public and private collections, was the starting point for Rui Pinheiro’s exhibition. The places where the pieces were photographed, in many cases the living rooms of private collectors, are revealed by the photographer and give a new context to the artist’s legacy. The visitor is confronted with more than 30 photographs of interior spaces that relate to paintings and drawings by Aurélia de Souza, as if proposing new stories.

The exhibition is sponsored by the BPI La Caixa Foundation and institutionally supported by Círculo Dr. José de Figueiredo – Friends of the Soares dos Reis National Museum.

Based on the project Chiado, Carmo, Paris / Arts in the Public Sphere, which aims to highlight the artistic production of Dordio Gomes and bring him closer to different spaces, the MNSR puts on the exhibition CHIADO, CARMO, PARIS THE PLACES OF DORDIO GOMES AND THE FORKS OF PAINTING in the cultural agenda of Porto, the city where the artist and pedagogue taught for 30 years. Its integration into the MNSR’s programming is also related to the presence of very relevant works by the modernist painter in its collection.

The result of a partnership with the Faculty of Fine Arts in Granada, Spain, the exhibition reflects the training of different generations. It includes contemporary plastic works by 24 Portuguese and foreign artists inspired by Manuel Ángeles Ortiz (1895-1984), one of the main representatives of the Spanish School of Paris, with a path parallel to that of Dórdio Gomes in the Parisian artistic world at the beginning of the 20th century. The artists’ appropriations, which present pieces of painting, drawing, sculpture and engraving, continue the artistic, pedagogical and aesthetic change, characteristics of Dórdio Gomes.

The exhibition’s parallel program includes a conference, at the MNSR, on April 20th around the journey and legacy of the painter and pedagogue Dordio Gomes.

With the presentation of Ana Cristina Jorge’s proposal – Scientific drawing and its pedagogical-cultural aspect in the imagery of Angolan artefacts in the museum context and as a factor in enhancing the collection and source of its own financing – we began a new way of disseminating it to the public research work on some of the museum’s collections. In this case, a group of Angolan artefacts that have been in reserve since 1940.

The work of designing and building object prototypes, for sale in the museum store, is an opportunity to reflect on the potential contained in the works we preserve, beyond the issues of historical representation or aesthetic meaning that we usually reveal.

This exhibition was part of the project, “Materials and Techniques of Painters from the North of Portugal developed by the Catholic University School of Arts’ Centre for Research on the Science and Technology of the Arts.

This exhibition presents 200 works from a universe of several hundred that the painter created. It is structured in groups, organized, initially, according to a chronological criterion and throughout the rest of the presentation according to a thematic criterion.

Artur Loureiro attended the Academy of Fine Arts between 1870 and 1875 and had the opportunity to visit European centers with a great artistic tradition, as well as closely following the aesthetic renewal movements of the late 19th century.

When Artur Loureiro arrived in Porto in 1901, he settled in the studio-school he opened in the Palácio de Cristal to continue his activity as a painter and teacher.

He held annual exhibitions to present and sell his paintings, as well as one to present his students’ work.

The exhibition is born from an attempt to test new understandings of drawing in the field of architectural practice, valuing above all the multiplicity of authorial expressions and the experimental nature of the sketched solutions.

It brings together around 200 drawings. The selection of the works presented came from the commissioners’ visits to ateliers, municipal archives and documentation centers, seeking to inventory a significant sample of the practice of drawing as an instrument of thought in resolving realized or merely projected architectural programs.

This initiative, which Cooperativa Árvore promotes every year among its members, invites the participation of all creative partners in all forms of expression. This year the exhibition brings together at MNSR a set of 169 original works – painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, tapestry, drawing, graphic work, among others.

The exhibition is presented as the highlight of the “Space, Body and Wellbeing” cycle, promoted by the University of Porto (U.Porto) and the MNSR, and the result of a joint venture between the U.Porto, the MNSR and the Serralves Foundation. In a unique circuit, it presents paintings by Paula Rego, from the Serralves collection, and pieces from the Anatomy museums of the Faculty of Medicine of the U.Porto and the Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences. The cycle also features conferences, installations and performances with the common objective of debating the body and its surroundings.

The exhibition is the result of the work developed in the new Curricular Unit of the University of Porto Culture, Art and Heritage: the museum as a place of enjoyment, which brings together undergraduate and master’s students from different areas such as Management, Law, Veterinary Science, Architecture or Fine Arts.
Reflecting the focus on collaborative projects and unlikely curations, the exhibition reinforces interaction with the MNSR’s audiences. In the third edition of the DEPOSITORIUM cycle, the pieces were selected from the painting, sculpture, jewelry, ceramics and textile reserves.
The proposal that the commissioners make to visitors is in line with the concept of a blind date with a work of art. At the entrance, a questionnaire is provided that suggests a match with one of the 15 works of art present and the visitor will have to find it, being confronted on the circuit by other pieces.

Magellan and the Peoples of Fire and Sea, designed by the Chilean agency AL SUR.REAL, documented how the native peoples of southern Chile welcomed Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet during the first circumnavigation.
From a free application available for mobile devices, visitors made their way through an augmented reality circuit of images displayed in watercolours and showing how these transhumant peoples lived; particularly how they navigated, hunted and what rituals they performed.

Renato Ferrão presents new works in a site-specific exhibition-installation. The visitor is confronted with a set of projection machines that claim an appropriate iconographic imagery, related to the alchemy of the image and its phantasmagoria.
The exhibition is part of the Orbital project program, a co-production between Cooperativa Árvore and MNSR that reinforces the concept of movement, of orbit between places, and that covers several disciplinary areas, from visual arts to cinema.

The exhibition is constructed from pieces from the 19th century and early 20th century belonging to the collection of the Science Museum of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to revisit the history of teaching and scientific research in the city of Porto. To bring together the assets that the University of Porto now brings to the entire community, the dedication of teachers who, over time, have preserved and conserved the instruments, allowing them to reach the present day. Only in this way is it possible to have a historical perspective of the technical education that was taught in the institutions that preceded the Faculty of Sciences and what took place in the first decades of this school’s life. It will also be possible to evaluate some modern objects, enabling a comparison exercise.

This exhibition is part of the celebrations of the centenary of the University of Porto.

The exhibition with photographs by António Menéres marks the 50th anniversary of the first edition of popular architecture in Portugal, the result of the Survey of Portuguese regional architecture (1955-1961), a pioneering work in the study and dissemination of the most forgotten architectural heritage.

MNSR accepted the challenge that one of the newest architects involved in this remarkable project posed to us. Architect António Menéres was one of the collaborators of the national team, coordinated by architect Keil do Amaral. The architect Carvalho Dias promptly joined the group.

The exhibition presents a representative sample of cultural buildings from Spain’s recent history, some with a new plan and others that recover the architecture of other times. Among the authors of the projects are some of the masters of contemporary Spanish architecture, as well as authors from a younger generation who ensure the renewed continuity of this commitment to quality.

This exhibition teaches the techniques of animation cinema through the collection of Casa da Animação and films made in Portugal.

It is a historical and technical journey through animated cinema aimed at people of all ages who want to experience it. Volume animation, sand animation, cutout animation and animated painting are some of the animation cinema techniques that will be taught in the interactive exhibition.

The presentation of Portuguese animation film production materials is organized according to a pedagogical logic and equipment and workstations are installed in the workroom that will allow visitors to experience the production of their own animation exercises.