Miguel Palma. (Still) Modern Discomfort

An unavoidable reference for Portuguese art at the turn of the twenty-first century, Miguel Palma is an artist who appropriates the narratives of a modernity that is constantly being questioned in order to better reflect on the present.

Miguel Palma is clearly fascinated by icons of classical modernity: the world of aviation, the motor car, architecture, nature (more or less domesticated), and technology in general. Here, however, these elements are continuously subjected to a conceptual migration, with the intervention of the artist demanding a vital hermeneutic densification. The appropriation of models, for example, compares them to a second-degree reality—the model essentially indicates the existence of another entity on another scale. However, the situations in which these are presented are situations that suspend the real, as if the objects’ excess of reality were to short-circuit, in a derisory game that makes the real become vertiginously polysemic and poetic. The artist’s creativity unfolds in a constructive impulse that evokes and questions concepts such as progress, degeneration, speed, and failure.

This exhibition presents an important survey of Miguel Palma’s work that covers a chronological period of thirty years and moves between a range of mediums, such as sculpture, video, installation, drawing, and performance. As well as monumental-scale works never before displayed in Portugal, like "Cinq temps" (2016), produced for the MuCEM, in Marseille, the artist created "Montanha" (2019), a piece conceived especially for the space of Museu Coleção Berardo.

What Miguel Palma proposes in the form of artworks are considerations of a completely unique existential density. His curiosity and way of articulating different horizons of knowledge underline our capacity to reinvent ourselves, dissimulating the inexorable higher law—the victory of time over human finitude. As devices that enable a critical perspective on our recent past and our present, Miguel Palma’s statements confront us with the tensions experienced in the fragile equilibrium of our existence. In the candid words of the artist: "If the world was comfortable, I wouldn’t make art."

Miguel von Hafe Pérez, exhibition curator

(Still) Modern Discomfort
Miguel Palma
Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon
19 September 2019  - 19 January 2020

Cover image:
Miguel Palma, Technical drawing of the peak of the mountain, 2019. Exhibition: “(Still) Modern Discomfort”.