After an early career in contemporary dance – during which he was a member of companies such as those of Pina Bausch (1973/74) and Gerhard Bohner (1975) – and having founded The Moon Dance Company with Jean Pomares in 1976, João Penalva settled in London that same year, where he lived and studied at the Chelsea School of Art between 1976 and 1981.

In the mid-1990s, after years of focusing on painting, his works began to expand in scale and incorporate diverse materials, such as photographs, videos, drawings, documents, slides, letters and all manner of notes and manuscripts. The patterns, ornaments and expressive surfaces of his pictorial output gave way to a disinterested and transversal narrative drive, making each new work a spatialised proposition where texts, images and objects wove together stories that viewers could unravel according to their own curiosity and associative imagination. Between reality and fiction, Penalva’s works became immersive and fluid experiences, in whose entirely plausible plots the viewer might assume, in turn or cumulatively, the role of witness, agent or accomplice.

These exhibitions celebrate fifty years of João Penalva’s activity as a visual artist, and thirty years of this particular dimension of his work, through the presentation of a dozen of his most emblematic pieces at Culturgest and, through a collaboration with the Lisbon Municipal Galleries, the restaging of A Colecção Ormsson apresentada por João Penalva, at the Pavilhão Branco, where it was originally shown in 1997 (from 18 April to 28 June). The Cinemateca Portuguesa is also joining this initiative, with a screening programme dedicated to the artist’s films on 8 and 9 June.