The museum Siza designed for Nadir Afonso painting – publico

 
         

                 

                         
                     

                         
                     

                 

 
 

The new Museum of Contemporary Art Nadir Afonso in Chaves, whose board will be unveiled on Monday evening by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, will host and give visibility to the gigantic work of Nadir Afonso (1920-2013), a painter modernist who joined the Parisian avant-garde post-war, was a pioneer of kinetic art, helped introduce geometric abstraction in Portugal and developed an original theory of art.

But Nadir Afonso painting, the museum gives see a large inaugural exhibition curated by art historian Bernardo Pinto de Almeida, is just one of the reasons that justify a visit to this new flaviense equipment. The other is the building itself, designed by Álvaro Siza on the right bank of the Tamega, a work of which the president of the municipality, also the architect Antonio Cabeleira, has said it will be the second Key icon, then the built Roman bridge two millenniums.

the construction of the museum, which cost eight million euros, was funded 85% by European funds, started in 2011 and was halfway when Nadir Afonso died in December 2013 to 93 years. The artist worked almost until the end, and therefore the draft Siza includes a beautiful studio with natural light and views of the river, which will now have to serve other functions.

“I think it’s one of the best buildings of Siza; I do not know if it’s the best, but of what I like, “said a few days ago another Portuguese Pritzker prize, Eduardo Souto Moura, about this building in white concrete, which occupies an area of ​​2,700 square meters and is set on a site about six times greater. Also the architect and critic of architecture Jorge Figueira sees the Key museum one of the most significant recent works of Alvaro Siza, putting it “at the same level of the building of the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre.” “It’s a very inspired Siza,” said Figueira Publico.

The museum is installed in place of Longras, an agricultural and ecological reserve, which required a special permit from the government. The proximity of the Tâmega and the regular occurrence of floods, led the architect to raise the building, which gives it a particular lightness. One of the most notable areas of the museum is its southeast side, with a continuous window of more than 40 meters above the river, which see the fields and old stone walls partially derruídos left over from the time when this was an area of agricultural properties.

“the building belongs to the city, but also to that landscape is a very kind and careful building, which has all wisdom and Siza experience but reinvented,” says Jorge Figueira, which is sure that the Museum of Contemporary Art Nadir Afonso “will turn out to be one of the key points of Siza itinerary in Portugal”.

the ceremony tonight marks the end of a lengthy process launched almost decade and half in 2002 when the then president of the Key Hall, the social democrat John the Baptist, agreed with Nadir Afonso the creation of a foundation to receive and disseminate his work, having been just then decided they would invite Alvaro Siza to build their headquarters. The painter’s widow, Laura Afonso, who now heads the foundation, says Nadir liked the project Siza, but “did not interfere in anything, not in the project or the location” because it had been the architect “and said that the more you cost were the interference. ”

And now?

The Foundation Nadir Afonso is the local authority partner in the Museum of Contemporary Art, and given free a hundred screens and hundreds of studies, including sketches of paintings, but also sketches of architecture, and also an important set of books and a vast document archive.

But if this opening is the fulfillment of a project that began to be dreamed of 14 years ago, it is now necessary to decide the to do with a museum of this quality and this magnitude, which associates an important modernist painter to a prestigious international architect, as indeed is confirmed by the various groups of foreign students of architecture that, even before the building was completed, were appearing Chaves to enjoy the on-site work in progress.