PORTO.- The exhibition ‘Álvaro Lapa: All of Time’ is the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the influential Portuguese artist Álvaro Lapa (Évora, 1939 – Porto, 2006). A writer and self-taught artist, Lapa was an influential Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Porto from 1976 until 2000, where he left an indelible mark on consecutive generations of artists, while also becoming a figure of reference in Portuguese art.

The exhibition at Serralves Museum brings together works from important museum and institutional collections and from private collections in Portugal, including the collections of artists, architects and writers who similarly defined the artistic and intellectual landscape in Portugal in the second half of the 20th century. Featuring over 200 works in painting and drawing from throughout the artist’s career brought together for the first time, the exhibition surveys Lapa’s remarkable contribution to contemporary art.

Álvaro Lapa remains among the most enigmatic artists in 20th century Portuguese art, with a body of work as relevant and alluring as it is defiantly elusive. Lapa bridged the disparate traditions of Portuguese painting – artisanal, figurative, abstract, and literary – through a sustained exploration of the territory of painting as text over four decades. The artist’s oeuvre revolves largely around the genres of landscape and portraiture, and often in the spaces between them. Lapa’s visual lexicon consists of narrative series of motifs encompassing the written word, fragments of language or snippets of conversation, as well as pictorial elements and abstracted self-portraits. Campésticos – a neologism invented by the artist that combines the Portuguese words for ‘countryside’ and ‘domestic’ – combines domestic space with the horizontality of landscape. Lapa’s work is also marked by an intense and sustained relation with literature, reflected in his series of paintings called ‘Notebooks’, dedicated to literary figures such as Homer and Rimbaud.

‘Álvaro Lapa: All of Time’ is organized by Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by guest curator Miguel von Hafe Pérez.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue – the most comprehensive to date – including reproductions of all the exhibited works and previously unpublished documentation along with essays by curator Miguel von Hafe Pérez, Spanish professor and art critic Estrella Diego, philosopher Sousa Dias, curator and art critic Óscar Faria, and João Ribas, senior curator and deputy director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. Numerous artists, curators, art critics, writers and friends from different areas and generations have also contributed texts on Lapa’s work.