[open the box] Júlia Ventura

Júlia Ventura’s work, in which she often uses self-depiction, deals with issues of identity. Her face appears on several different supports; whether in series of images that narrate microfictions, or in patterns that cover extensive areas of wallpaper (in an allusion to the work of Andy Warhol) and constructed saturated atmospheres. Sometimes it is no longer the face that occupies the process of depiction, but the repetition of the digital impression on panels, or covering walls, or the image’s subject being enormously enlarged.

In many of these cases, Júlia Ventura speaks of identity, of its representation and the field of eroticism that covers the possibility of a body being exposed and telling a story or setting up a situation from its exposure.

The series of images belonging to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos is a part of a set of works from further back in her career and which invariably involve the use of a series of images that form a drama.

The characters in these dramas are decontextualised, with it never being clear what the nature of the role they play is, nor the narrative they are serving. They are like stills from a film, exclusive close ups that do not give any indication of the space or time, with the props reduced to the minimum and all the attention focused on the face. So it is a performing work in the most representational sense, in which she constructs characters that activate small plots without a defined sequence – which, indeed, is clear through the absence of an established order for them to be assembled.

In the final analysis, the focus of this work lies in the image of a metamorphic face that always holds a version of an unknown female story. In this constellation there is a map of a sensitivity on the edge of equilibrium and identity.

Biography
Júlia Ventura was born in 1952, in Lisbon. She mainly uses photography as a support, although she has presented works in painting and installations. She lives in Lisbon and Amsterdam. She exhibited for the first time in 1977 at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes (Lisbon), immediately showing her work in several different Portuguese and foreign museums, of note among them being: Stedelijk Museum, Foto’s uit de Collectie: Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Júlia Ventura, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 1991), Two ways of life. Júlia Ventura, Centro Cultural de Belém (Lisbon, 1997), En la piel de toro, Palácio Velázquez, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1997), Júlia Ventura, marcar imprimir expor, 1982-2003, Fundação de Serralves (Oporto, 2004), and Júlia Ventura, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea (MNAC) – Museu do Chiado (Lisbon, 2006). She is represented in several different private and institutional collections in Portugal and abroad, with particular note for the Netherlands Media Art Institute, the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (Switzerland) and the Fundação de Serralves.

Bibliography
Two ways of life. Júlia Ventura (cat.), Lisboa, Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997.
Júlia Ventura, marcar imprimir expor, 1982-2003 (cat.), Porto, Fundação de Serralves, 2004.