Ana Vidigal

Ana Vidigal is an obsessive collector of inherited materials "lost and found" in houses, attics, shops and fairs; of objects with a history the artist knows, but never reveals in her work. This is the basis of her archive of the world, an image-based and technical inventory that is the foundational broth from which she develops manual studio work that is at once rigorously disciplined by thought.

She compiles foreign and domestic magazines from the 1960s and 70s, comic strips, photo comics, needlework albums, embroidery hoops, crochet patterns, children's books, images relating to fashion and cinema, dolls, letters, stamps, boxes and packages. This never ending accumulation of the sediment and spoils of everyday life is compulsively stored and eventually cut out and reconfigured into collage paintings in which, in all their diversity of format, texture, colour and technique, the act of gluing takes on a central and agglutinating role.

The titles of her works are suggestive, sometimes poetic or ironic clues that add to the reading of the work and to the small phrases she inscribes in them, invoking a deep subjectivity. They convey her interest in the "emotional damage" related to events that are either intimate or political, highlighting the tension between the feminine desire for autonomy and the place that society has reserved for her.