RUI SANCHES AT THE BERARDO MUSEUM
The Berardo Collection Museum opens next October 9th “Espelho”, an individual exhibition by our collaborator Rui Sanches, Professor at the Degree in Visual Arts at the University of Algarve.
“Espelho”, curated by Sara Antónia Matos, presents recent series of works in which the artist crosses supports, media and techniques – drawing on paper, photography, clay sketches, wall sculptures in various materials. Taking into play multiple references, namely art history, the set reveals a thought that detaches itself from the plane to invade space and, simultaneously, in inverse motion, returns to the paper surface, as if tearing its two-dimensionality, perforating it and creating depth.
The exhibition will also feature an interview by the CIAC team as part of the Artist Talks series, conducted by Mirian Nogueira Tavares, which can be viewed here.
The opening takes place at 7 pm at the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon and has free admission
Rui Sanches is a Portuguese sculptor born in 1954 in Lisbon.
In 1974, he dropped out of medical school (then attending his third year) and joined Ar.Co (Center for Art & Visual Communication), where he attended the Introduction to Painting, Sculpture and Photography courses. In 1977 he left for London where he studied at Goldsmiths’ College, earning the Bachelor of Arts with honors in 1980.
He then went to the United States, where he enrolled at Yale University (New Haven), finishing a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture. Returning to Portugal in 1982, Rui Sanches resumed the work he had begun in the United States a year earlier, which had since then favored the materials of an industrial nature used in everyday life: plywood, glass, metal pipes, sheet metal, hinges, among others.
In the mid-1980s, he presented himself as one of the protagonists of the so-called postmodernism. His work referred to the history of art, using as reference paintings by David, Poussin and other artists, which he transposes to sculpture, in the process of deconstructing one work, to reconstruct another.
In the 1990s, he began carving with a process of accumulating wood extracts (plywood and wood pellets) in a more organic search. They are sculptures constructed from stratigraphies of wood pellets, in which each stratum successively serves as a mold to the stratum that immediately succeeds it in space and time.
Thus, Sanches’ sculpture, often made from a clay model, eliminates the artist’s modernist idea as the author of the idea rather than of physical practice. In this case, the artist is always the author of the work, understood as a whole.
During the 1990s, Rui Sanches served, from 1994 to 1998, as assistant director at the José de Azeredo Perdigão Center for Modern Art (CAMJAP).
