< News & PressI don't know if I can wish you a happy year
I don't know if I can wish you a happy year
Mário Teixeira da Silva collection, MNAC, PT
Curatorship: Adelaide Duarte
14 April to 28 August 2022
Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado
Rua Serpa Pinto, 4 | Rua Capelo, 13
213 432 148
www.museuartecontemporanea.gov.pt
The exhibition publicly presents, for the first time, a group of leading artists from this particular collection. A well-established gallery owner, Mário Teixeira da Silva has gathered, over fifty years, relevant works by Portuguese and international artists. The title chosen for the exhibition refers to the exhibited work “I don't know...”, by Jimmie Durham, and its enigmatic character is a link between this collection of works with a long chronology and different artistic typologies.
Exhibition context
Following the cycle “Colecionar Arte”, promoted by the direction of Os Amigos do Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea-Museu do Chiado, in which Mário Teixeira da Silva participated, in 2017, with moderation by Adelaide Duarte, the idea arose of exhibiting the collection that had never been shown in the country. The current management of MNAC cherished the proposal and managed to gather the conditions for this first public presentation of the Mário Teixeira da Silva collection, in Portugal.
Very diverse, in terms of the representation of authors and media used, the collection presents groups of works of great importance in the field of modern and contemporary art, both Portuguese and international. Also including elements of art known as tribal, it is also worth mentioning the important nucleus of photography.
About the collector
Mário Teixeira da Silva is an amateur collector and a compulsive reader. He makes his travels his “moments of freedom” to let himself be seduced by objects. It brought together a collection of international contemporary art, with an artistic spectrum that goes far beyond its gallery work. Graduated in Chemical Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of Porto, in 1975 he opens the Modulo-Centro Difusor de Arte, first in Porto, and later in Lisbon. This gallery, dedicated to new trends in contemporary art, maintains, until today, and for almost five decades, the same persistent and coherent line of work.
