Joana Rosa
Learn about the artist's universe through a text accompanied by a selection of works from the exhibition “All I want – Portuguese women artists from 1900 to 2020”
By Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Text by Lígia Afonso / Plano Nacional das Artes
Joana Rosa bases her work on doodles or scribbles, as she describes them, alluding to the impetuous nature of universal actions such as “breaking a match between your teeth, fiddling with an empty sugar sachet in a café or sucking and biting a pen”.
The artist draws in an automatic fashion, favouring form over content. Some drawings end up drenched in detail, fantastical and replete with colour; others, rendered in lead and graphite on tracing paper, are colossal, monumental creations. The latter, in macerated black, stem from the practice of overlapping, concealing and uncovering layers. When we delve deep into them, we uncover mechanical forms, intimate writings and appropriated drawings.
Such fragments are crumpled, overlaid, stapled and stuck to the wall at the point of installation, based on a sweeping and highly performative conception of space that is informed by the artist’s past experience as a dancer.
Doodles (1995) by Joana RosaOriginal Source: Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto
Doodles, 1995
Graphite on tracing paper
Variable dimensions
Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, inv. FS 0236
Rosa couples her interdisciplinary approach with a penchant for collecting, classifying and cataloguing appropriated objects and texts, creating a veritable archive of actions and notes that map visceral human behaviour.
Doodles (Fragments) (c. 1991-1999) by Joana RosaCalouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Doodles (Fragments), c. 1991-1999
Graphite on tracing paper
201,5 x 189 cm
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian – Centro de Arte Moderna, inv. 94DP1719
Learn more about the artist:
Joana Rosa | Museu Calouste Gulbenkian
Joana Rosa | Artnet (in English)
Selection of works presented at the exhibition All I want: Portuguese women artists from 1900 to 2020, in its first moment at Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, within the scope of the cultural program that takes place in parallel to the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2021.
Exhibition organized by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture, Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage (DGPC) and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in co-production with the Center of Contemporary Creation Olivier Debré, Tours, and with the collaboration of the Plano Nacional das Artes (Portugal).
Curators:
Helena de Freitas and Bruno Marchand
Text by Lígia Afonso / Plano Nacional das Artes
Selection of online resources Maria de Brito Matias
Learn more about Joana Rosa's works presented in the context of this exhibition:
All I want: The Space of Writing
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