Contemporary Art Museum, casa (house) and parque (park), Porto, Portugal. September 2019
The gardens of the Casa da Serralves, Porto, Portugal
The Museum was designed by Álvaro Siza (1999) and the park by Jaques Greber to complement the 1930s art deco style of Casa da Serralves.
Located a little ouside the city (R. Dom João de Castro 210, 4150-417 Porto), you can get a bus from close by the Igreja do Carmo – numbers 200, 201, or 207 buses – from Carmo, taking half an hour.
The architecture of the Museum is collosal, and sculptural, in keeping with its function. With a blue-sky backdrop, and in contrast to the surrounding garden, it is seen to best effect.
Time and again the buildings complement the landscape and vice versa.
Olafur Eliasson’s silver birches was the first artwork to be seen in the foyer. Lit by natural light from the window above and with eerie street-lamp, yellow man-made lighting, the trees are in water and yet dying. An effective statement on how climate affects nature, we walked through the ‘grove’ as we would the exhibits afterwards – trees as art?
The current exhibition, Voyage to the Beginning and Back, is a retrospective of 30 years of Serralves. From the little wood, we move into the galleries to Eliasson’s ‘Y/Our Future is Now’, consisting of horizontal metal spirals in a mirrored space where, once again, the outside, seen through the window, plays a large part.
When seen in the green, Eliasson’s work has both a grounded and spacey feel to it. Loops and swirls, suggestion of a treble clef and wonky infinity sign, they seem to dance and float, throwing glorious shadows on the lawn.
Fitting three or more works to a room, and also showing in the house, there is a wide range of artists represented, from Sol le Witt to Simon Starling, Hamish Fulton, Andy Warhol and Lygia Pape.
Dominating the junction between tree lined avenues, Oldenburg’s enormous, eye-catching red trowel teeters on its tip as if left by a random gardener. Here is the everyday tool assuming its true importance.
Urns of ashes, posing as the art itself, again take centre stage: scattered around an empty room and catching the light, complementing the fixtures and fittings. Faced with what could be our final resting place, a snake may rise out of one, a genie from another if rubbed. Is now the time to take control of life before it ceremoniously ends?
You hear Drop before you grasp what is happening. Rounding the corner to be faced with stairs, a ping pong ball tap tap taps down the stairs in front of you as you stand at the top. In fact, there is nothing to be seen except the hanging speaker and members of the public who are descending before you. Echoing against the bare walls, the sound gently, humorously plays with your reality. The windows at the bottom of both flights add an underwater colour scheme which mimics the azulejo tiles of the garden’s pools (see above).
The parting of the ways, of the biblical Red Sea, were suggested by this simple, stone installation. Its placement in front of the long windows, despite the parquet flooring, added an air of the outdoors, where Long’s work is so often situated: another example of the merging of inner and outer spaces.
This red velvet topped performance area only allows the audience to see the feet of those inside. A TV screen beside the work, shows tango dancers dancing together on the circular, blue platform, the ankles and lower legs making it even sexier!
Finally, the building itself, inside and out, is worth seeing, quite apart from the art.
Tamsin Writing 