The inaugural curatorial program of this new Contemporary Art Center is by the curators David Santos and José Maçãs de Carvalho and starts with the cycle “What is a Collection made of?” and with a first exhibition of a series of three, entitled “Corpo e Matéria”, which presents 27 works from the referred collection.
The invited curators thought of the program in terms of several autonomous exhibitions, each guided by an axis of conceptual dialogue. These axes will, in turn, be organized under a general title that will seek to attract and raise visitors' awareness of the importance and novelty of the great works in this collection, thus making the general public aware of the value of a set that will surely enrich the artistic heritage and the cultural offer of the city of Coimbra in terms of contemporary art.
The first exhibition of the cycle “What is a collection made of?”, Defined under the scope of the concepts “body” and “matter” (with a long tradition in art history) intends to relate works of painting, sculpture and photography that represent different examples in the approach of these concepts, translated either by figurative elements linked to the representation of the human “body”, or by idiosyncratic and more abstract elements that refer to the interpretation of the disciplinary “body” presented there. In this same context, there are also works where the “material” value of its visual expression converts the whole into a true plurality of images, techniques and processes, creating in its relationship numerous analogies and approaches of an aesthetic and artistic nature.
This reading of a dialectical character, between sets and ranges of values, also favors a comparative analysis between works from different recent historical periods, from the first modernism to the most disruptive contemporaneity. With this first set of works, the public will have the opportunity to immediately recognize the artistic value of most of the pieces that make up the Collection of the Contemporary Art Center of Coimbra and the promise of future quality of the curatorial project that is announced there as a program, thought and translated into several exhibitions.
This first exhibition will feature artists such as Allan Sekula, Amadeo Souza Cardoso, Ana Vidigal, Antoni Muntadas, Douglas Gordon, Helena Almeida, João Louro, João Loureiro, João Tabarra, John Baldessari, Julião Sarmento, Júlio Pomar, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Paula Rego or Rui Chafes, among others.