The Minister of Health, Manuel Pizarro, is chairing the opening of the exhibition “PORTRETO DE LA ANIMO ART BRUT ETC.” at the Soares dos Reis National Museum in Porto at 6pm today.
In the context of the Raw Art exhibition that is now being proposed, the Soares dos Reis National Museum intends, through its artistic collections and the use of the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection, to develop a programme that encourages discussion and approaches to mental health through art and artists.
Started in the 1980s, the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection, on deposit at the Centro de Arte Oliva, includes a large collection of works of Art Brut, one of the most important and extensive private collections in the world, with a large number of recognised authors.
Inspired by the journey started by Jean Dubuffet, a pioneer in collecting these artistic productions, the two collectors have put together a set of works that become accounts of the unconscious and unintentionally take on subversive aspects in the face of the discourse of the norm and the established order. They question the limits of reason through different coded messages, formulae, invented figures and secret codes.
The exhibition “Portreto de la Animo” is a section of this magnificent collection that aims to bring together a group of works focused on the portrait and the self-portrait that will enter into confrontation or exhibition dialogue with other pieces from the collections of the Soares dos Reis National Museum.
The portraits painted by these artists reveal an inner figure, a particularly vivid creativity and invention, as can be seen in the works of Aloïse Corbaz, Ted Gordon, James Deed, Edemund Monsiel, Aleksander Lobanov, Alessandra Michelangelo or the Portuguese artist Jaime Fernandes, among others. Many of them appear to be self-portraits that claim an existence of which these artists were and felt deprived.
The Soares dos Reis National Museum is presenting an exhibition of portraits and self-portraits from the Treger Saint Silvestre collection, one of the most important and extensive private collections of Fine Art in the world.
The exhibition “Portreto de la Animo”, according to curator António Saint Silvestre considered “the largest exhibition of Art Brut ever held in the Iberian Peninsula”, is being promoted in partnership with the São João da Madeira City Council, the Oliva Art Centre and the collectors António Saint Silvestre and Richard Treger, with the patronage support of the Millennium bcp Foundation and Lusitânia Seguros and the institutional support of the Círculo Dr José de Figueiredo – Association of Friends of the MNSR.