Died Luis Serpa, the first cosmopolitan gallerist – publico

                 

                         
                     

                 

 
                         

The gallery owner, cultural project manager and curator Luis Serpa, one of the most influential figures of Portuguese art of the last decades, died Thursday morning. Suffered from a neurological disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and died at the Hospital of St. Joseph, in Lisbon, where he was hospitalized since Sunday. Was 66 years.

                     

                          Luis Serpa was one of the most salient cultural agents who led transformation of the panorama of the visual arts in Portugal. Since 1984, did the Comic Gallery (today Luis Serpa Projects), in Lisbon, a strong artistic dynamic space, whose international assertiveness was central to the art scene of the time, systematically combining interdisciplinary projects.

“noticed the paradigm shift that the decade introduced, crossing disciplines (art, architecture, music and theater), diversifying the lines of artists who worked or dialoguing with the situation Spanish at a time of great dynamism of the Lisbon -Madrid, that Arco fair fed, “says the critic and curator John Pinharanda.

The reputation of the gallery came this ability to internationalization, working several generations of Portuguese artists such as Julian Sarmento, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Jorge Molder and Homeostético group, or Spanish as Cristina Iglesias and Juan Muñoz, among others.

Dedicated since the its beginning to exchanges with their foreign counterparts, the Comic Portugal brought significant artists on the international scene, and national artists fulfilled the vocation of dynamic gallery, promoting their work abroad, through participation in art fairs.

The photographer Jorge Molder, who worked with Luis Serpa for about a decade from 1983, but who knew him since the early 1970s, notes that both Iglesias Muñoz as, for example, “are creations yours. “

” He had a vision, some lucid way, the international art scene, and was always up to date with the work of galleries from other countries, “the photographer and former director of the Center for Modern Art Gulbenkian, also noting that the Comic gallery has always been “a meeting point and link between different generations, both Portuguese and foreign artists.”

Among these are Joseph Kosuth, Gerhard Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gilberto Zorio, Hamish Fulton, Robert Wilson, who underwent facilities in Luis Serpa Gallery. Another characteristic that marked its programming was the constant attention to the art of photography:. Robert Mapplethorpe, John Coplans, Boyd Webb, Cindy Sherman and the own Jorge Molder are some examples

John Pinharanda says Serpa established your network International by network of the most significant artists he worked with, including Julião Sarmento. “It was so we could see in Portugal first performances of Cristina Iglesias, Muñoz, Barceló, Sicilia, Sevilla, Curro González, etc., but also of Kosuth or Bob Wilson. As the new directions of Portuguese art with the discovery of new ways of work of Julião Sarmento or Leonel Moura, we could see consecrated or the revelation of new generations, as Cabrita Reis, or Homeostético group, that, previous routes, ensured through of the first exhibitions in the gallery its consecration by young critics of the decade and new audiences and new generation of collectors. “

” The first years of Comic activity were exemplary, “recalls Molder, highlighting the concern that the gallery owner always had to make their programming had echo abroad. “He was concerned to make the artists who exposed came out there, but also in bringing the outside in the country,” he says.

John Fernandes says Luis Serpa “was the first gallerist cosmopolitan Portuguese “, referring to the exchange of their artistic concern with the outside. “He launched a new artistic context at the beginning of the 80s,” the deputy director of the Reina Sofia Art Centre in Madrid, remembering the importance that at the time, had exposure Post-Modernism (1983).

John Fernandes adds that in addition to his gallerist activity, Luis Serpa signed relevant curatorial projects with other art institutions, and cites his attention to photography and, in particular, the self-portrait, recalling the Incidentally, the exhibition presented at the Serralves Museum, with Fernando Pernes, Je suis un autre .