Gabriela Albergaria
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
Gabriela Albergaria's work proposes a cosmovision based on the primacy of nature and on the need for its experience, investigation, revitalisation and cultural reconstruction. Through means including sculpture, installation, photography and drawing, her works propose the repair and healing of plant ecosystems weakened by a process of systematic destruction. Her work pushes back against the finiteness of natural resources with the creative and experimental power of art.
She recreates compositions in which drawings complete or imagine missing parts of landscape photographs, in which sculptures rebuild trees that are already dead or condemned to removal.
Soquence 358 (2019/2020) by Gabriela AlbergariaOriginal Source: Private Collection
Soquence 358, 2019-2020
Inkjet print on fabric, acrylic paint on paper Heritage Woodfree Bookwhite 315 g
101 x 100 cm
Private Collection
Couche sourde (2010/2020) by Gabriela AlbergariaOriginal Source: Collection Gabriela Albergaria and Galeria Vera Cortês
Couche sourde, 2010-2020
Earth, tree branches, pressed
Variable dimensions
Collection Gabriela Albergaria and Galeria Vera Cortês
Tree cut into cubes and aligned (2019/2020) by Gabriela AlbergariaOriginal Source: Courtesy of the Artist and Galeria Vera Cortês
Tree cut into cubes and aligned, 2019-2020
Wood from a tree felled in Monsanto Forest Park, Portugal
49 x 847 x 49 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Galeria Vera Cortês
Gabriela Albergaria highlights, collects, groups, classifies, catalogues and manipulates natural specimens, revealing their diversity. She makes use of the colours, shapes and representations of these specimens' constituent elements, transforming and decontextualising them to narrate a sensory and subjective experience, but also an aesthetics and politics of landscape.
She is interested in ecology, the history of gardening and the domestication of nature, botany and landscape architecture. Guided by a critical vision of the historical processes of appropriation, exploitation and acculturation of the natural world, Gabriela Albergaria subliminally appeals to an organic union with living nature.
Book of leaves (2015) by Gabriela AlbergariaOriginal Source: Collection Anne and António Castro Freire
Book of leaves, 2015
Cardboard, paper, coloured pencil on paper
21 x 13 cm (folded)
Collection Anne and António Castro Freire
Wall piece (2015) by Gabriela AlbergariaOriginal Source: Courtesy of the Artist and Galeria Vera Cortês
Wall piece, 2015
Bronze
8 x 20 x 15 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Galeria Vera Cortês
Learn more about the artist:
Exhibition "Do not destroy", Gabriela Albergaria (in English)
Entre Imagens – Gabriela Albergaria (in Portuguese)
Entrevista a Gabriela Albergaria | LAND.FILL (in Portuguese)
Exhibition «A Natureza Detesta Linhas Retas», Gabriela Albergaria | Culturgest (in Portuguese)
GABRIELA ALBERGARIA EM DISCURSO DIRETO (in Portuguese)
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 Gabriela Albergaria's works presented in the context of this exhibition:
All I want: Le Vivant
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