PORTO.- The Serralves Foundation opened Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers, an expansive exhibition by the celebrated American artist best known for her use of language to explore the dynamics of freedom, power, and political expression.
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Holzer-isms
By Jenny Holzer
A compact collection of Jenny Holzer’s sharp, provocative statements on language, power, public space, politics, and contemporary art.
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The artist’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, Wrong Answers traces the trajectory of Holzer’s career, from early text series such as Inflammatory Essays to later explorations across diverse materials and forms, including carved stone benches, sarcophagi, paintings, smashed heaps of stone, LED signs, human bones, and more. Curated by the Museum’s director, Philippe Vergne, the exhibition is being presented at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art from June 18 to November 1, 2026. Among the highlights are two collaborations with Porto-based graffiti artist Kilos, who painted over Holzer’s iconic Truisms posters in one gallery and cover two walls of another space with Holzer’s texts rendered in his own style.
Wrong Answers examines how Holzer’s work responds to a historical moment in which the overwhelming volume of visual and written content across media neutralizes and distorts meaning. Through works that feature both inscription and erasure—ranging from painterly appropriations of redacted government documents to the smashed heaps of her own stone sculptures—Holzer shows how words can amplify impressions and attitudes and at the same time be stripped of value.
Philippe Vergne, Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, said, “It is a tremendous privilege to work with Jenny Holzer, an artist who has never minced her words, never compromised, and who possesses the discipline to engage critically with the world and the challenges of our time without fear. I am honored and proud of this exhibition, which I see as a work of art, and the installation, which has been conceived for Álvaro Siza’s design for the Museum and gives visitors much to reflect upon.”
Jenny Holzer said, “Here is a smart, kind place and I am glad to be present to offer what I can.”
The exhibition features texts from some of the artist’s most celebrated series, including:
• Truisms (1977–79): single-sentence statements that highlight the social construction of beliefs, mores and truths
• Inflammatory Essays (1979–82): provocative declarations influenced by Holzer’s readings of political, religious, and other manifestos
• Living (1980–82): quiet observations, directions, and warnings written in a matter-of-fact style and first presented on cast-bronze plaques
• Survival (1983–85): cautionary sentences that instruct and inform while questioning how individuals respond to their environments
• Laments (1989): a chronicle of unnecessary death in the voices of the unknown and unnamed who suffer
The works on display range across the many media in which Holzer has worked, including:
• LED signs: the familiar technology of news and advertising, animated via robotics and reprogrammed with ambiguous and challenging messages
• Stoneworks: engraved benches and sarcophagi in marble and granite, a counterpoint to the more ephemeral format of the artist’s electronic works
• Bone works: ethically sourced human bones heaped into sculptural arrangements on the ground to evoke the impact of sexual violence in war
• Paintings: declassified government documents transferred by hand to linen and layered with oil paint and metal leaf
For over forty-five years, Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) has questioned and transformed the way we experience language. Using texts projected onto buildings, carved into stone, and embedded into culture, her work establishes words as a medium of visual expression, adding another chapter to the long and complex history of relationships between what is to be read and what is to be seen.
The American artist’s wide-ranging practice also encompasses posters, sculptural installations, drawing, painting, and electronic signs. Her emphatic capitals have appeared in urban landscapes around the world, insinuating themselves into the channels of official and commercial communication to deliver messages of a different sort, from unflinching accounts of the horrors of war to poetic celebrations of the joys of being alive.
Holzer’s word-based art is an ongoing exploration of the political implications of public speech and the interactions of language and space. And while her work was first created for the streets and remains at home there, it can also be found today in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Guggenheim, and many others.
