With Julião Sarmento, artist, and Joana Valsassina, curator of the Serralves Foundation itinerant program
With a multifaceted and deeply coherent path, Julião Sarmento is one of the Portuguese artists with the greatest international projection, having been the target of two major retrospectives at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, in 1992 and 2012, among numerous exhibitions around the world. Exploring ambiguous territories associated with gestures of seduction and transgression, Julião Sarmento's work builds on himself, weaving a network of references to cinema, literature, popular culture, everyday episodes and his own work.
In this conversation with the artist, we will start from the nucleus of works of his own belonging to the Serralves Collection to touch on themes that run through his work, revisiting individual exhibitions of the artist organized by the Museum and revealing some particularities of an important recent acquisition. Artist, collector, curator and cultural agitator, Julião Sarmento's impact on the world of arts in Portugal expands far beyond his prolific artistic production. In dialogue with one of the most outstanding personalities in the contemporary artistic panorama, we will approach the different aspects of his career, seeking to know how he sees the future of art in the face of today's challenges.