The Gulbenkian Modern Art Center de Lisboa, a reference facility in the international circuit of European visual arts, has scheduled an ambitious solo exhibition by Carlos Bunga, a Portuguese artist who has been living and working in Barcelona for years.
The exhibition is curated by Rui Mateus Amaral, artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA), and starts from one of Bunga’s surrealist drawings: My First Home Was a Woman, 1975 (2018), which evokes his pregnant mother’s journey from Angola to Portugal in 1975, fleeing civil war to save her 2-year-old daughter and unborn child.
The exhibition has been conceived specifically for the Nau 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 enters into dialogue with the permanent collection of the CAM through some works selected by Bunga expressly for the occasion.
Alongside 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 has been possible thanks to the direct collaboration of the Ramon Llull Institute.
Carlos Bunga (Porto, 1976) studied at the Higher School of Art and Design in 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 to transform painting into a space of activity.
His process refers to the experiences of conceptual and performing artists of the sixties and seventies, who used simple and iterative gestures to generate sensory and emotional intensity. Over the years, his practice has expanded into drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and video. Among his most relevant recent exhibitions is the participation in the 35th São Paulo Biennial – choreographies do impossible, and also in Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana – Imaginando futuros.
Rui Mateus Amaral (Ponta Delgada, Azores, 1988) is artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA)where he has curated exhibitions by artists such as Alex Da Corte, Phyllida Barlow or Carlos Bunga, among others. In 2022 he organized Summerthe first solo exhibition of Félix González-Torres in Canada, and in 2021 he co-founded the MOCA triennial, Greater Toronto Art.
