[open the box] Ana Vieira

The domestic space, its strangeness and its relationship with female sensitivity (and condition) have always been at the centre of Ana Vieira’s work. Throughout, on the different supports she uses (sculpture/installation, photography and, recently, video), there has been a succession of domestic spaces dealt with in order to grant the spectator a perception of a domestic scene transformed into a public space. The relationship between the interior and exterior, between what is seen and what one can guess at through the game of transparencies formed by veils marking out the spaces of the simulacra of dwellings, makes up a theatrical situation, as if we were in front of a stage or movie set.

The situations that Ana Vieira has been building often refer to Art History, quoting works that form imaginaries on women’s status and condition, that have created frameworks or destroyed them. This is the case of the piece that Ana Vieira created for the Alternativa zero show in 1977, the exhibition curated by Ernesto de Sousa which possesses a symbolic value in its affirmation of the contemporary condition of Portuguese art. In this work, titled Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, the projection of a slide of the painting of the same name by Manet on a picnic table on which two bottles, a plate and a painter’s palette are placed, reconstructs the exterior in which the central figure of the female nude caused a scandal.

Her quotations of classical statue work and painting (but also of Duchamp) are not mere demonstrations of erudition – although they show this – because they also propose updatings of readings that appropriate nodal moments in the construction of ideological formulae as to the female condition.

However, the situations do not always form global situations.

Sometimes there are elements that are removed from their context and are transformed into small sculptures integrated within showcases or placed on plinths.

This is the case with this work, from 1993, in which the cut bottle shows its inside, once again carrying out the games of closing/opening, of hiding/revealing that are also evoked by her installations.

Biography
Ana Vieira was born in Coimbra in 1940 and grew up on São Miguel is- land in the Azores. In 1964 she graduated in Painting at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa. She started exhibiting in group exhibitions in 1965, and held her first solo – Imagens ausentes – in 1968, at the Galeria Quadrante (Lisbon). She participated in the famous Alternativa zero show, organized by Ernesto de Sousa in 1977. Her work is represented in several collections, namely at the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and at Fundação de Serralves, an institution that devoted an anthological exhibition to her in 1998-1999.

Bibliography
Ensaio para uma paisagem (cat.), Lisboa, Museu Nacional de História Natural, 1997.
Ana Vieira (cat.), Porto, Fundação de Serralves, 1998-1999.