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desenho | drawing 1965-2024

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This anthological exhibition of Sobral Centeno ’s drawings covers a period of roughly sixty years of work, offering its visitors a rare opportunity to become familiar with an impressive and continuous graphic corpus that marks the oeuvre of one of the most unique names in the Portuguese art scene.

Defined by inexhaustible energy and constant experimentation, his drawing work develops as a perfect balance between extensive series — predominantly marked by the repetition and reiteration of a theme, shape or composition — and single, isolated pieces that emerge without lineage, as if spontaneously generated.
Drawing is frequently the less known part of many artists’ work, even though it often, as is the case with Sobral Centeno, runs throughout their oeuvre. It is the ideal means to discipline the hand and exercise the brain, to pass the time and engage the mind, to solve formal or compositional problems. Centeno’s work moves between grace and gravity, irony and earnestness, rapidity and delay. Most of all, it is an endless exercise in recollection and (self-)quotation.
Usually kept behind the scenes but sometimes shown to the public, drawing is, in fact, both the foundation and the operative and experimental field of Sobral Centeno’s oeuvre.

– Nuno Faria, 2024

The Artistic Practice of Luísa Mota

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Getting to know the work of Luísa Mota is like delving deep into one’s subconscious; it is both exhilarating and unsettling similar to the sensation of riding a roller coaster in an amusement park; you want to do it but as soon as you walk onto the platform to take your seat and push the guard rail down a sinking feeling lays in your gut, then you do it all over again just for the thrill.

– Sylvia Chivaratanond

The book reflects the artistic process of Luísa Mota’s work for the last fifteen years. It serves as an introduction and approach to a unique and dense artistic practice that unfolds here at a graphic and conceptual level. The Artistic Practice of Luísa Mota is a project conceived by the artist in close collaboration with design studio Macedo Cannatà.
Luísa Mota was born in Porto, Portugal, where she currently lives and works. She graduated in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College and has a Master in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, both in London. Her work includes performance, photography, sculpture, and video and addresses issues related to belief systems, religious and cultural stigmas that define common behaviour patterns.

Texts by João Vilela Geraldo, Sylvia Chivaratanond, Nuno Faria, Miguel Amado, Gilda Williams, Ayrson Heráclito, João Ribas, Márcio Harum Romeu Zagalo, Stella Bottai.

Árvore Vertical

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André Sousa presents Árvore Vertical, a meticulous author’s edition limited to only 80 copies. This publication transcends the traditional format, unfolding as a 20-page leaflet structured by 9 precise folds that dictate the rhythm of the visual experience.
Inside, the work showcases a series of photographs capturing trees and botanical motifs, where the artist explores organic textures of nature. The unique folding system allows the viewer to navigate the imagery in a non-linear way, mirroring the layered complexity of the forest itself. By choosing this tactile and fragmented format, Sousa transforms the act of reading into a spatial exploration, turning a simple document into a collectible art object.

AUTO-PHOTOS

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Gretta Sarfaty was born in Athens, Greece, and moved with her family to São Paulo, Brazil, in 1954, where she naturalized as Brazilian. Since the 1970s, Gretta Sarfaty has composed different series of photographic montages based on portraits of herself taken during performative photoshoots with Julio Abe Wakahara, a professional photographer she directed. The artist book Auto-Photos, first edited by Massao Ohno in Brazil, in 1978, has been reissued by Central Galeria in 2021. For this book Gretta selected works from three series: Auto-Photos, 1975; Transformations, 1976; and A Woman’s Diary, 1977. The common aspect among them is the principle of tensioning the representations of women, using, manipulating and distorting stereotypes, both through interventions during the printing process and performing different conventional female characters – the ingenuous student, the slut, the sexy, the angry and crazy, the vamp, and the intellectual for instance. She also used photos of her body naked to make A Woman’s Diary, in which she shows a fragmented and deformed naked body. The new version of the book is almost a facsimile, the additions are an essay by Mirtes Marins de Oliveira and the reproduction of an image on the last page, that was not integrated to the first edition because it was considered too controversial at the time in Brazil.