PORTO.- The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art is bringing together five influential artists and filmmakers in an ambitious autumn and winter programme that explores the changing relationships between images, language, sound, materiality and representation. Featuring major exhibitions devoted to Lee Ufan, Anri Sala, Jenny Holzer, Alice Neel and Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes, the programme spans generations and disciplines while reinforcing the museum's commitment to artistic experimentation and international dialogue.

A central highlight is Lee Ufan: Fragments of Infinity, the Korean-born artist's first major exhibition in Portugal, which opened on October 16, 2026, across the Serralves Villa and Park. The programme also includes a presentation devoted to Miguel Gomes, recipient of the Best Director Award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, and a forthcoming site-specific exhibition by Anri Sala. These projects complement ongoing exhibitions by Jenny Holzer and Alice Neel, both receiving their first solo presentations in Portugal.

Together, the five exhibitions examine how art can transform perceptions of the world, question established forms of representation and engage with the political, historical and social realities that shape contemporary experience.

Lee Ufan: Fragments of Infinity

On view through March 7, 2027, Fragments of Infinity introduces Portuguese audiences to the work of Lee Ufan (b. 1936), a central figure and leading theorist of the Japanese Mono-ha movement. Over more than six decades, Lee has investigated relationships between objects, materials, space and perception, developing an artistic language that emphasizes encounters rather than isolated forms.

Presented throughout the Serralves Villa and Park, the exhibition brings together paintings and sculptures that establish a dialogue with the surrounding architecture and landscape. Natural stones are juxtaposed with industrial materials, while minimal brushstrokes explore the connections between gesture, time, presence and emptiness.

The artist's concept of Relatum shifts attention away from the artwork as an autonomous object toward the relationships it creates with its environment. At Serralves, these interactions extend into the landscape, encouraging visitors to reconsider the spaces between natural and constructed forms, as well as the role of perception in shaping artistic experience.

Miguel Gomes: Exploring the Boundaries Between Documentary and Fiction

The Manoel de Oliveira Cinema House is presenting the first exhibition devoted to Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes (b. 1972), whose work challenges conventional distinctions between documentary and fiction, preparation and chance. The exhibition opened on October 31, 2026, and continues through May 30, 2027.

Gomes, who received the Best Director Award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, has developed a distinctive cinematic practice in which research, filming and editing frequently reshape the original creative concept.

The exhibition brings together all his short films, excerpts from feature films, scripts, notebooks, drawings, photographs and previously unseen footage. Tracing his career from Entretanto (1999) to ongoing projects Selvajaria and Cantiga, the presentation offers insight into the filmmaker's working methods and the evolving relationship between creative process and finished film.

In Arabian Nights, investigations into the social and economic effects of austerity in Portugal provided the basis for fictional narratives, while Grand Tour emerged from documentary filming in Asia before the screenplay was written.

Through simultaneous projections and sequences re-edited specifically for the exhibition, visitors can explore how Gomes transforms documentary material into cinematic storytelling, continually questioning the distinction between reality and invention.

Anri Sala: Sound, Space and the Experience of Time

Opening November 27, 2026, Anri Sala's first major exhibition in Portugal will occupy the Serralves Museum's Left Wing, including its Central Gallery. Conceived specifically for the institution, the presentation will bring together significant works from throughout the artist's career and more recent creations, including a series of frescoes associated with his move to Naples.

Sala's practice examines the relationships between moving images, sound, music and architectural space, creating immersive environments in which time and perception become essential components of the artistic experience.

Rather than offering a conventional chronological overview, the exhibition proposes a non-linear encounter with his work. The interaction between sound, moving images and spatial composition challenges familiar ideas of duration, sequence and continuity.

The presentation will also establish a direct dialogue with �lvaro Siza's architecture, continuing Serralves' longstanding interest in projects that respond to the physical and experiential characteristics of museum spaces.

The exhibition remains on view through April 25, 2027.

Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers

American artist Jenny Holzer (b. 1950), whose practice has explored the political and psychological power of language for more than four decades, is the subject of Wrong Answers, on view through January 3, 2027.

The exhibition, Holzer's first solo presentation in Portugal, brings together works ranging from her early Truisms and Inflammatory Essays to later projects incorporating electronic signs, carved stone, painting and textual erasure.

Holzer's use of language challenges the systems through which information is produced, circulated and controlled. Her works frequently confront issues of power, ideology, censorship and violence, examining how words shape public opinion and collective experience.

At a moment when the proliferation of digital information and images increasingly complicates distinctions between fact and manipulation, Wrong Answers considers the consequences of concealing, altering or suppressing language.

Works incorporating redacted government documents and fragmented sculptural elements reveal tensions between visibility and secrecy, communication and control, while emphasizing the continuing importance of critical engagement with the information that surrounds us.

Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect

The programme also includes Alice Neel: Beautifully Imperfect, the first exhibition in Portugal dedicated to the American painter Alice Neel (1900–1984), on view at the Serralves �lvaro Siza Wing through January 17, 2027.

Bringing together works created between 1926 and 1983, the exhibition offers a thematic rather than chronological examination of Neel's commitment to portraiture and the human figure.

Throughout her career, Neel remained dedicated to depicting people at a time when abstraction dominated much of the American art world. Her subjects included family members, neighbours, workers, artists, activists and individuals whose experiences were frequently overlooked within mainstream cultural representation.

Her paintings combine psychological intensity with an acute awareness of the social and political conditions surrounding her subjects. Rather than idealizing the human body, Neel embraced physical imperfection, vulnerability and individuality, revealing the complexities of personal identity and lived experience.

Beautifully Imperfect places her achievement within the broader context of twentieth-century social transformation, highlighting the continued relevance of her work to contemporary debates about gender, inequality, identity and representation.

An International Programme Across Art, Architecture and Cinema

The five exhibitions reflect the multidisciplinary identity of the Serralves Foundation, which promotes contemporary culture through art, architecture, cinema, landscape and environmental engagement.

Designed by Portuguese architect �lvaro Siza and inaugurated in 1999, the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art forms part of a larger cultural complex that includes the Serralves Villa, its surrounding Park and the Manoel de Oliveira Cinema House.

By presenting artists whose practices range from painting and sculpture to cinema, language-based art, sound and site-specific installations, the museum encourages connections between different forms of creative expression and their historical and social contexts.

While Lee Ufan investigates the relationships between materials and their surroundings, Anri Sala explores the spatial and temporal possibilities of sound and moving images. Jenny Holzer examines the political consequences of language, Alice Neel reveals the complexity of human identity through portraiture, and Miguel Gomes investigates the fluid boundaries between documentary observation and cinematic fiction.

Together, their exhibitions offer visitors distinct but interconnected perspectives on the ways art interprets experience, questions established narratives and creates new relationships between works, spaces and audiences.

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art's autumn and winter programme continues through May 30, 2027, with exhibitions presented across its museum galleries, historic villa, park and cinema facilities.