In the mid-1990s, João Penalva (Lisbon, 1949) began developing a truly unique category of works. After years devoted to painting, his pieces started to grow in scale and incorporate a wide range of materials, such as photographs, videos, drawings, documents, slides, letters, and all kinds of notes and manuscripts. Although they resembled installations, that wasn’t quite their nature; the interactions between these materials didn’t aim to draw attention to the physical space of the gallery or to the concrete experience of its occupation. On the contrary: they established a fictional space, where texts and images contributed to the unfolding of narratives shaped by our curiosity and associative imagination—like being inside a cabinet d’amateur or an evidence room from which the inspector has stepped out.

This exhibition celebrates thirty years of this particular strand of João Penalva’s work by restaging a selection of fifteen of his most emblematic pieces, including, as part of a collaboration with Galerias Municipais, the restaging of the seminal ‘Ormsson Collection’ at Pavilhão Branco, where it was originally presented.