The exhibition took around 100 pieces from the MNSR’s painting, sculpture, drawing and engraving collections across borders, in a joint initiative with the Secretariat of Culture of the State of São Paulo, through the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. The meeting allowed exploring the construction of art in Portugal and Brazil – a theme that mobilized artists, institutions and those interested in Fine Arts throughout the 19th century.
The exhibition was sponsored by EDP and Cisa Trading and had the support of the Consulate General of Portugal and Experimenta Portugal 2017.

This temporary exhibition brings to public enjoyment a set of pieces from the collection of the Venerable Third Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel with the purpose of publicizing its artistic heritage, thus promoting what will be its future museum.

The MNSR, in collaboration with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, hosts the exhibition JOSÉ DE ALMADA NEGREIROS: DRAWING IN MOTION, which brings together 90 works that highlight the importance of cinematographic language in the visual work of this unique figure of Portuguese modernism.
In this exhibition, several works that were exhibited at the Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon, and new works will be presented. In a large part of Almada’s work, his desire to tell stories with images is clearly visible, many of which contain hints of humor, both in series of drawings and in works integrated into buildings and even tapestries. Fascinated with the possibility of bringing the drawing to life and setting it in motion, Almada had the intention of experimenting with animation several times, but he never made his wish come true.

The 22 portraits that we present at MNSR were created by Ricardo Leite based on a choice of personalities made by Professor José Augusto França. The knowledge that this notable art historian has of the works in the museum’s collection adds to the tribute of those portrayed a happy encounter and elevates the portrait, a genre represented in the permanent exhibition.
The visit to this exhibition is therefore an opportunity to tour the museum to discover these works from the 16th to the 20th century and to look at them in the light of the suggestions that Mário Cláudio makes in his timely observations about the portrait.

The exhibited buckles, pins and threaders are part of the collection of over 300 pieces gathered by the architect, José Carlos Loureiro, a major figure in the Porto School of Architecture. In 2017, when it was deposited in its entirety at the Soares dos Reis National Museum for public enjoyment, it achieved museum status and later became part of the permanent exhibition.
Underlining the unusual fact of focusing on this particular type of everyday object, such a natural part of all our lives, the collection is outstanding for the quantity and functional variety of such pieces. It thus provides a vast chronological reading closely linked to the progress of clothing and fashion.

The works that Regina Brito exhibits for the first time appear accompanied by some other works from the MNSR collection and one by Albuquerque Mendes. This proximity allows us to reflect on the dimensions of a form of expression that Regina Brito presents, from 1993 onwards, beginning to paint sometimes with paint and sometimes with lines. Without any project, without anything previously considered and defined.

On the 170th anniversary of João Allen’s death, the MNSR carries out an old project of holding an exhibition in honor of the founder of one of the 2 museums in Porto that, in the 19th century, were a harbinger of modernity and linked collecting and the protection of heritage with research and education, the Allen Museum.
The commissioners, Rui Morais and José Costa Reis, with the collaboration of João Allen’s family and the other institutions that hold collections that belonged to him, Câmara Municipal do Porto and Misericórdia do Porto, started by studying the passport from the trip to Italy that João Allen carried out in 1826/1827 and created an exhibition that traces the route of this journey and shows its influence on the opening of this collector’s museum in the city of Porto, in 1837.
The diverse nature of the collections on display in the exhibition, both in temporal and disciplinary terms, reflects the eclecticism that the training and determination of an erudite man like João Allen imprinted on his museum.

As part of the European Heritage Days, this year under the theme SHARE MEMORIES, the MNSR is exhibiting a group of portraits that evoke the memory of former inhabitants of Palácio dos Carrancas. Owners, unexpected guests and members of the royal family are part of around 140 years of the building’s history until 1942, the year in which the MNSR opened its permanent exhibition at Palácio dos Carrancas to the public.

The exhibition’s guiding thread is the painter’s relationship with writers such as Vergílio Ferreira, Eugénio de Andrade, Mário Cláudio, Vasco Graça Moura, Fernando Namora or Viale Moutinho, who approached his work at different moments in his long artistic journey. It contemplates other dimensions of the relationship between words and images, namely through the literary illustrations to which Júlio Resende dedicated himself, the comic strips and humorous drawings, which he published early on in the press, and the production of costumes and sets for dramatic texts taken staged by Teatro Experimental do Porto, Teatro Experimental de Cascais and Seiva Trupe.
Painting and drawing, studies and projects aimed at a comprehensive artistic practice with a great experimental nature allow us to observe Júlio Resende between image and text, in the multiplicity of discourses to which he knew how to adapt and which were elaborated on him.

The exhibition presents photographs from the 35 mm Group made up of António Campos e Matos, Carlos Valente, Eduardo Martinho, Gaspar de Jesus, João Menéres, João Paulo Sotto Mayor, Joaquim Soares, Jorge Viana Basto, José Carlos Matias Serra, Óscar Saraiva and Ricardo Fonseca .

Under the sign of metamorphosis, Graça Morais takes up in an entirely new series of drawings and paintings on paper a very particular look at humanity. From the images committed to contemporary society, there is a very diverse set of faces and figures that are as intriguing as they are grotesque, as serene as they are restless, as dense as they are ethereal, from which the artist creates a complex web of human emotions and actions.
As visual fictions, his drawings are, in some way, the materialization of a disconcerting, transgressive universe, separated from any rational and logical organization of meanings. The focus of this new series of drawings and paintings is once again on the human figure and its condition.

As part of an international artistic project, artists from different geographies such as Japan, Belgium, Latvia and Portugal were invited to work on fragments of the camellia tree, based on samples sent to each one and which were later found at the MNSR exhibition and in another exhibition at the Museum of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP). Through a poetic vision, the project seeks to think about ethics with nature, the transactional condition of human actions and the pictorial and artistic recognition of ancestral and transversal processes such as engraving.
The exhibition involves as partners FBAUP, i2ADS – Institute for Research in Art, Design and Society, MNSR, Associação Portuguesa das Camélias, Matriz – Porto Engraving Association and Japan Foundation.

Augusto Lemos presents the photography exhibition I LOVE BICYCLE at MNSR. “I photograph bicycles like I photograph people, from what they say without saying it”, he explains at the opening of the exhibition, which brings together images captured between 2013 and 2018 in European and Asian cities such as Paris, Saint Petersburg or Beijing.
With a PhD from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona, Augusto Lemos was Adjunct Professor at the Higher School of Education of the Polytechnic of Porto.

To mark the 150th anniversary of O DESTERRADO, a masterpiece by António Soares dos Reis, the MNSR proposes new perspectives on the sculpture with the exhibition Azul no Azul, which brings together watercolors by artist Nelson Ferreira and a film by Italian filmmaker Gianmarco Donaggio. Young artists demonstrate how much classical masters influence the creation of contemporary artists with their timeless works.

Nelson Ferreira’s pieces, worked on live in an artistic residency at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, in Lisbon, are created using the alla prima technique and explore Blue in watercolors on absorbent paper. The film is the result of the meeting between the painter and the Italian filmmaker Gianmarco Donaggio and reflects how the painter sees the world while creating his works.

“Blue is the liminal space where movement cuts through static, painting meets cinema, and dynamic tension sets dreams free. Blue, in the film, is neither a statement nor a color, but rather the emergence of a feeling”, reads the opening text of the exhibition, signed by art historian Hilda Frias.

The exhibition features a large number of historically relevant pieces, including many from private collections, some never before seen. This exhibition reflects the way in which the arrival of the Portuguese in India, by creating, in the 16th and 17th centuries, new transoceanic trade routes, made it possible for Europeans to commission hitherto unknown artistic objects.
The exhibition is made up of around 70 pieces such as medium-sized portable furniture (safes, office chests, game boards, offices, counters, tables and chests) and luxury household objects, mostly made of precious materials, which transport us to specific production centers along the western Indian coast.
Integrated into the program of the European Presidency of the European Union, the exhibition is curated by Hugo Miguel Crespo and is promoted in partnership with the Embassy of Portugal in India and the Círculo Dr. José de Figueiredo/Friends of the MNSR.

In the MNSR there are thousands of pieces that remain in reserves and are very rarely exhibited. In the first exhibition of the DEPOSITORIUM cycle, whose main objective is to make the collection available to the public, the selection is made by the entire MNSR team, which mobilized to demonstrate the aesthetic quality of 16 works from the collections of ceramics, sculpture, goldsmithing and jewelry, painting and textiles. The exhibition also includes the Phototypic and Descriptive Album of the Works of Soares dos Reis, which belongs to the MNSR Library.
The objective is, in the future and through different curators, to present in future editions a selection made by guests from various sectors of society, with different perspectives and experiences.

This is an exhibition of poetry and drawing that allows greater knowledge of José Régio’s production. Drawings of an intimate nature, references to the poet’s imagination, set in Indian ink, wash, colored pencils and pigmented wax, consolidating the previous scratching of graphite, mark the author’s manuscript, sometimes included in the fabric of the poem, sometimes anticipating -or succeeding it, materializing the fleeting impression that seemed to escape him, reads the presentation made by curator Rui Maia.
This exhibition appears as a proposal from the Municipal Councils of Vila do Conde, place of the writer’s birth and death, and Portalegre, where he taught for much of his life. It results from the activities of the national working group structured within the scope of the evocation of the 50th anniversary of José Régio’s death, which was marked in 2019.

The Porto Design Biennale 2021 program includes the presentation of the AUTRE exhibition at MNSR, curated by Caroline Naphegyi and Sam Baron. Using the surrealist technique of cadavre exquis, AUTRE asked French and Portuguese artists, designers and thinkers to develop creative work based on a set of objects collected in Porto, including in the MNSR reserves.
The result of the creative work is evident not only in the Museum’s exhibition rooms, but also in Cerca, a space that is open to visitors and which houses a significant part of the lapidary collection.
The curators’ proposal is to question the contribution and impact of humans on the planet, the representations and stories revealed by the artefacts and the concept of a Museum itself. Collecting and showing, conserving and communicating, studying and connecting, contemplating and circulating are some of the dialectics explored in this exhibition.

The photography exhibition STUDY HERE!, an initiative of the ACT – Aprendir com Todos project, has the active participation of students from the Leonardo Coimbra School Group, in Porto. Curated by José Rosinhas and photography by Paulo Pimenta, the exhibition is the result of work developed with young people. Photography was the starting point for the dialogue between space and time, between stories of young people and stories of the schools they attend. The initiative is supported by European funds and promoted by the Catholic University of Porto, in partnership with Rede Inducar.

The MNSR promotes an exhibition dedicated to D. Pedro IV, in an allusion to the date on which he disembarked near this city and, in the following days, when he settled in the Palácio dos Carrancas, where the MNSR is now located.
The exhibition July 8 | DIA DE D. PEDRO IV at the Museum brings together historical pieces around the history of Portuguese liberalism and the victory over the absolutists. It also presents the Palácio dos Carrancas as the building that would, years later, become the Royal Palace in Porto, where D. Pedro IV led the liberal troops.

The exhibition Blue and Gold – Enamels in Portugal from the Medieval to the Modern Era was based on one of the founding pieces of the Museum’s collection: a series of 26 enamel plaques painted in the 16th century, from the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra. It brought together and compared for the first time in Portugal various enamel techniques applied to a sumptuous group of liturgical, devotional and ceremonial objects.
The pieces on display were produced between the 12th and 19th century, mainly in the Limoges’ region workshops, recognised as the most prestigious. Several national treasures are highlighted, including the Christ’s Passion triptych from the Frei Manuel do Cenáculo National Museum, one of Portugal’s most internationally renowned enamel works.

The MNSR, in a co-production with the Porto City Council and the Círculo Dr. José Figueiredo – Friends of the MNSR, hosts the photography exhibition NEM 3 DAYS THE WORLD SEES PASS, by Graça Sarsfield and Francisca Siza. Curated by Bernardo Pinto de Almeida, the exhibition combines digital and analogue in a new intergenerational photographic perspective, presented in a diptych format.
This exhibition is shared between Graça Sarsfield, the grandmother, and Francisca Siza, the granddaughter, who work in analogue and digital respectively. While Graça Sarsfield builds the images analogically, Francisca Siza deconstructs them from the matrix, using digital, editing new images. In this marriage where the cold digital technology merges with the analogue, the aim is to talk about what is finite giving way to something else: Finitude/Renewal.
The exhibition is also presented as a tribute to Luís Serpa, who disappeared in 2015, a Lisbon personality who greatly boosted contemporary art.

The MNSR, in partnership with the Círculo Dr. José de Figueiredo – Friends of the MNSR, opens the exhibition DRAWINGS BY EUROPEAN MASTERS IN PORTUGUESE COLLECTIONS II: ITALY AND PORTUGAL, which includes around 100 drawings produced by recognized Italian and Portuguese masters.
Curated by Nicholas Turner, one of the most prestigious international experts in the field of drawing, the exhibition includes works classified as National Treasures and features the only example of Leonardo da Vinci existing in the country, belonging to the collection of the Museum of the Faculty of Fine Arts from the University of Porto, as well as studies and preparatory and visionary sketches by António Domingos Sequeira, most of them from the MNSR collection.

The DEPOSITORIUM 2 exhibition features works of art chosen from the Museum’s reserves by the Rector of the University of Porto and the directors of the Faculties of Medicine and Dental Medicine and the Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences of this academy. Reinforcing a partnership that has been worked on in recent months, the exhibition features pieces from the ceramics, drawing, sculpture, lapidary and painting collections.
The exhibition circuit is based on a reflection on Art and Medicine, historically interconnected concepts. The ties that unite this professional world of health with that of museums are close: both assume themselves as guardians, some of human heritage, their body and mind, and others of cultural, material and immaterial heritage. Never before have they complemented each other so much, and today, Art is often prescribed as a therapy and a form of disease prevention, says António Ponte, Director of the Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis, at the opening of the exhibition.
António de Sousa Pereira, Rector of the University of Porto, justifies that the selection of works stems from his condition as a doctor and researcher in Biomedicine and highlights the raw, and often poignant way in which they represent human suffering and death itself. The pieces selected by the Rector are joined by those from the Directors of the Faculty of Medicine and Dental Medicine, as well as the Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences.

The MNSR hosts the temporary exhibition SEJA DAY OR SEJA NIGHT IT DOESN’T MATTER, with works and curated by Pedro Calapez and André Gomes. The artists’ proposal merges into a unique 3-way dialogue, between the modernity of Pedro Calapez’s painting and André Gomes’ photographs with the naturalism of Artur Loureiro, a 19th century painter strongly represented in the MNSR collection.
This is an exhibition with pieces already presented in 2021 at the Berardo Museum, but which are now displayed in a unique circuit with paintings by Artur Loureiro, together telling a unique narrative of landscapes and figures.
At a time when the MNSR is preparing the long-term exhibition and reflecting on the commitment to greater proximity between the public and the Museum, the exhibition SEJA DAY OR SEJA NIGHT IT DOESN’T MATTER appears as an opportunity to present different artistic periods that combine with each other .

The FERNÃO DE MAGALHÃES exhibition. BY THE SEAS OF THE WHOLE WORLD documents the circumnavigation voyage (1519 to 1522), initially conceived and commanded by Fernão de Magalhães and completed by Sebastião Elcano. Held in partnership with the Mission Structure of the V Centenary of the First Circum-Navigation Voyage and curated by Amélia Polónia, Amândio Barros and João Paulo Costa, the exhibition focuses on the story of a discovery – the discovery of the blue planet and the Pacific Ocean – and includes a section dedicated to the biography of Ferdinand Magellan and his experiences in the service of the Portuguese Empire and another on the memory that the world preserves of Magellan today.

The exhibition commemorated one of the most significant women in the Portuguese art world, with a remarkable life spanning the late 19th and early 20th century. Having started her artistic training at the Porto Academy of Fine Arts, she boldly travelled to Paris, where she met the most renowned artists of her time.
As the Soares dos Reis National Museum has a significant number of the artist’s works in its collection, the exhibition branched out to include works from other public and private collections, providing a wider presentation of Aurélia de Souza’s work.
Life and Secret Aurélia de Souza 1866-1922 had four major themes: Lives (portraits); Spaces (intimacy); Themes (plurality of genres) and Colours (self-portraits and self-representations). In the words of the curator, Maria João Lello Ortigão de Oliveira, “They encompass, within the physical limits of a museum space, the visible world of a woman artist as radical as she was secret”.

The MNSR has a calendar of visits to the exhibition that take place on Saturday mornings and afternoons, activities for families and conversations around topics related to Aurélia de Souza.
The exhibition was part of a commemorative programme especially prepared by a set of entities to mark the first centenary of Aurélia de Souza’s death, seeking to enhance and disseminate knowledge about her life and, above all, her work.
The exhibition has the patronage support of the Fundação BPI La Caixa and the institutional support of the Círculo Dr. José de Figueiredo – Amigos do Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis.

The Faculty of Fine Arts of Porto University (FBAUP) and the Soares dos Reis National Museum held an exhibition highlighting the use of drawing in different faculties of Porto University (UPorto). Part of the DRAWinU research project, the exhibition opened with a 19th century anatomy study by António Soares dos Reis and included a series of other drawings by different artists, produced in different contexts by the UPorto community.