The Perpetual Interview

Ana Jotta (Lisbon, 1946), who had a major retrospective exhibition at the Serralves Villa in 2005, is one of the artists with the highest number of works featured in the Serralves Collection. Over the last four decades, she has explored virtually every artistic field  from painting to sculpture, including design, installation, and use of techniques associated with the ‘minor arts’ such as embroidery, sewing and pottery  in a constant challenge to any traditional notions of authorship. Jotta is a genuine artist-collector, who constantly appropriates other people’s objects, iconography, phrases and titles. The uniqueness of her work includes a complete absence of style to the point where we seem to encounter the works of various artists in each of her solo shows. For this reason, this exhibition which aims to foster a dialogue between works from the Serralves Collection and works by other artists represented therein (and even several artists who have been invited to present previously unseen works) can be viewed as an encounter between two collections: the Serralves Collection and the ‘Ana Jotta Collection’. In addition to paintings, sculptures and embroidery by Ana Jotta, the show features works by other artists who have collaborated with her, such as Pedro Barateiro, Isabel Carvalho and Pedro Casqueiro and paintings, films and sound installations by artists who emphasize some of the key features of Jotta’s artistic practice: obsessive repetition, sophisticated and premeditated amateurism, an intimate relationship with interior decoration and theatre (some of her works resemble props, or copy specific patterns) and the use of sound, in particular the voice.   Curated by Ricardo Nicolau and Filipa Loureiro, Fundação de Serralves Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto   
Artists featured in the exhibition: Manuel Alvess,  Pedro Barateiro, Isabel Carvalho, Pedro Casqueiro, Patricia Dauder, Ana Jotta, David Lamelas, João Marçal, Dennis Oppenheim, Musa Paradisíaca, (Miguel Ferrão & Eduardo Guerra) Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela, Nuno Ramalho,  Ângelo de Sousa