The Gulbenkian Modern Art Center of Lisbonequipment of reference in the international circuit of the European visual arts, has scheduled an ambitious individual exhibition of Carlos BungaPortuguese artist who has been living and working in Barcelona for years.
The exhibition is curated by Rui Mateus Amaralartistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto (MOCA), and part of one of Bunga’s surrealist drawings: My first home was a woman, 1975 (2018), which evokes the journey of his pregnant mother from Angola to Portugal in 1975, fleeing the civil war to save her 2-year-old daughter and the son she was carrying in her womb.
The exhibition has been conceived specifically for the Nave del CAM, where the artist creates a monumental forest of cylindrical shapes at different scales, working with fragile and ephemeral materials, as he usually does. In addition, the installation dialogues with the permanent collection of the CAM through some works selected by Bunga expressly for the occasion.
Parallel to the installation, an extensive catalog has been published with texts by Rui Mateus Amaral and essays by several international authors such as Roland Groenenboom, Omar Kholeif, November Paynter, Rina Carvajal and Catarina Rosendo. This publication was made possible thanks to the direct collaboration of the Ramon Llull Institute.
Carlos Bunga (Oporto, 1976) studied at the Higher School of Arts and Design of Caldas da Rainha. He lives and works in Barcelona, and his work revolves around the possibilities of form. What began as an investigation into the limits of painting has become a work that hybridizes supports and surfaces until transforming painting into a space of activity.
His process refers to the experiences of conceptual and scenic artists of the sixties and seventies, who used simple and iterative gestures to generate sensory and emotional intensity. Over the years, his practice has extended to drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and video. Among his most relevant recent exhibitions, his participation in the 35th São Paulo Biennial – choreographies of the impossibleas well as in Manifesta 15 Metropolitan Barcelona – Imagining futures.
Rui Mateus Amaral (Ponta Delgada, Azores, 1988) is artistic director of Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)where he has curated exhibitions by artists such as Alex Da Corte, Phyllida Barlow or Carlos Bungaamong others. In 2022 organization Summerthe first solo exhibition of Felix González-Torres in Canada, and in 2021 co-founded the MOCA triennial, Greater Toronto Art.
