Coleção Berardo (1960–2010)

On this floor, the presentation of the museum collection is dedicated to the period beginning in 1960 and extending over five decades. The exhibition brings together the most significant neo-avant-garde artistic movements, such as Minimalism, Conceptualism, Post-Minimalism, Land art, and Arte Povera, among others. During the course of these movements, the art object underwent a profound transfiguration of its traditional categories; implied in its manifestation now was the realisation of assumptions only previously glimpsed at by the historic vanguards, later to be reconfigured.

The journey begins with Minimalist experiments that claimed for the art object the primacy of perceptual experience over and above linguistic knowledge, giving rise to a further development of sensorialism, no longer confined to the field of vision, but now stretching to all movements of the observer’s body. The role of verbal language and its relationship with images (usually photographic) probed by Conceptualism determines another order for the art object, which has now lost its link to manual craftsmanship, positioning itself as an idea of what the object might be as art. If Minimalism had placed value on industrially produced objects, Italian Arte Povera confronted this technological determination with the value of natural substances and their poetic legacy, engaged in a critical dialectic. In its turn, Land art expanded the field of artistic action out into the landscape and from it into the museum. The emergence of the body as a medium of artistic realisation concerned various artists at the beginning of the 1970s, and their works remain as documents of actions memorialised in such testimonies. In addition to all this, we are shown the emergence of video as an artistic practice, with the diversity of positions that give rise to it; and the new German photography: systematic, documenting the monuments of an economic order, stemming from a culture that had rejected the art object itself.

In this sweep of five intense decades, some of the principal positions of Western art in the third quarter of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century are staked out.

Pedro Lapa
Curator