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Coloured pencil on paper, cotton thread, brass nails
Photo Filipe BerndtIn “Color Chart Brasília,” Gabriela Albergaria develops a color chart of the botanical elements in the Brazilian capital. The artwork employs scientific processes of observation and species cataloging. Mediated through systems of representation, Albergaria’s pieces generate varied interpretations of what we perceive as landscape—a complex system of material structures, visual hierarchies, and cultural constructs that shape the framing of our visual field

84 x 44,5 cm
Colour pencil on paper Heritage Woodfree Bookwhite 315gsm paper
Photo Filipe Berndt

200 x 525 cm
Colored pencil on Heritage Woodfree Bookwhite 315g paper Photo Jean Peixoto


300 x 500 x 200 cm
Himalayan ceder, branches from other tree species, harware and soil Photo Galeria Vermelho This installation recreates the shape of a tree using sections of branches collected from diferente tree species and grafted onto the trunck of a Himalayan cedar (Cedrus deodara) that was planted in the garden in 1976 and died in 2016. The work offers a reflection on the cycle of nature – life, death and rebirth – and on its power of regeneration. As trees decompose they stimulate new life, becoming “nurse logs” that are colonised by Other plants and animals. It takes as long for a tree to decompose as it does for it to grow, and so trees that are hundreds of years old will take just as long to fully return to the soil.
440 x 28 x 28 cm
Wood from local tree Photo Edouard Fraipont

Variable dimentions
Bricks, tree trunks and branches, screws and steel cables Photo Galeria Vermelho
65 x 65 cm (each) - 14 pieces polyptych
65 x 65 cm (each) - 14 pieces polyptych Photo Fred Dott
8 x 130 x 1400 cm
Brick, sand and cement Photo Fred Dott Invented in the late 19th century, the steam plough optimised cultivation processes due to its ability to perforate the hard surface layer of the soil. Through this action, the land acquired and undulating surface, creating a peculiar transformation of the landscape. After many decates of intensive agricultural exploitation, these lands are now being reforested for soil recovery. Installed in the área of the Schäferhof in Neuenkirchen, this site-specific intervention exemines this historical facet of the landscape as a unique phenomenon that accumulates traces of human activity.
10 x 15 x 12 cm
Rubber Photo Bruno Lopes A seed of “pich” (the Mayan name for the tree Enterolobium cyclocarpum) is cast into a mold that allows the reproduction of several copies. The shape of the piece fits perfectly in one hand, suggesting a material—warm to the touch—but also an action: an object to manipulate and to squeeze. But this new material resists pressure and returns to its original shape. The piece subtly refers to the historical relation between natural rubber and violence (exerted against nature and the indigenous peoples in the times of the rubber boom, in the 19th century).
5 100 x 100 x 100 cm modules
Trunks and branches of two full oak trees and local pressed soil Photo Bruno Lopes An entire holm oak is cut into fragments, which are later reorganized into cubes and installed according to the structure of a family tree. The structure of the tree is often used to organize information: a main trunk, large thematic branches and subdivisions that are increasingly precise as they grow farther from the roots. The traditional exploration of timber usually discards the branches and focuses on the trunk: Despite the fact that it lost its original shape, Albergaria uses the entire specimen, proposing another way to organize its matter. The soil, which in its natural habitat provides support and sustenance to the tree, is here used to ensure its stability as a sculptural image.
9 x 9 cm
Pressure treated lumber embedded in the wall Photo Bruno Lopes A square of matter intrudes upon the color and texture of the wall. When seen up close, it reveals to be a block of wood with a strange structure that does not match any of the traditional cuts: vertical (revealing the grain) or horizontal (revealing the growth rings). In fact, its appearance is almost zoomorphic, almost vermiform. How was it cut? Where does it come from? Neither natural nor completely artificial, this wood is produced using an industrial process that completely rearranges its intrinsic structure in order to render it much more resistant than the original material.
129,6 x 129,6 x 3,5 cm
Clay pieces from Magdalena River (Colombia) and Évora, genetically unmodified bean seeds and compressed local dirt Photo Bruno Lopes Small clay cubes with a non-genetically modified seed inside. The sculpture, referring to Minimalism in the systematic repetition of a geometric shape, is in fact a potential small forest, patiently waiting for the moisture conditions which will allow its organic component to sprout and break away from its rational container.
129,6 x 129,6 x 3,5 cm
Clay pieces from Magdalena River (Colombia) and Évora, genetically unmodified bean seeds and compressed local dirt Photo Bruno Lopes Small clay cubes with a non-genetically modified seed inside. The sculpture, referring to Minimalism in the systematic repetition of a geometric shape, is in fact a potential small forest, patiently waiting for the moisture conditions which will allow its organic component to sprout and break away from its rational container.
129,6 x 129,6 x 3,5 cm
Bronze, acrylic paint and colored pencil on wall
Photo Irene Fanizza“I used a thorn from a ceiba or silk floss tree (Ceiba speciosa) that I collected on one of my daily expedition trips in the Amazon and produced several replicas in bronze. The piece indicates the 13 places Where this species grows along the Equator.”
Gabriela Albergaria, in the catalog for the exhibition “Nature Abhors a Straight Line”, Culturgest, Lisbon, 2020.

46 x 90 cm
Colored pencil on paper Photo Edouard Fraipont
46 x 35,5 cm (each) - 4 peças
Colored pencil on paper Photo Edouard Fraipont In “Quatro Estações” [Four Seasons], Albergaria creates a sort of catalog of colors of the seasons of the year. On her trips, the artist gathered leaves from different places around the globe. Spring is represented by tree leaves gathered in Narrowsburg (USA); the colors that represent summer are in leaves from Portugal and Connecticut (USA); the autumn colors come from Brooklyn (USA); while those of winter were gathered in São Paulo. Beyond an intense exercise concerning color, “Quatro Estações” is also a semi-informal poetic representation about the passage of time.

55 x 77 cm (each) - 5 parts
Colored pencil on paper Photo Edouard Fraipont
11 parts with 30 cm height
Patinated bronze and acrylic paint Photo Edouard Fraipont
41 x 56 each (60 piece polyptych)
Laser engraving on wood and drawing printed on cotton paper Photo Ding Musa “This piece was developed from Tenente Siqueira Campos Park in São Paulo, better known as Trianon Garden. Each of the five diptychs is composed of a set of laser woodcuts from original drawings and of another set of inkjet prints. This piece addresses the passage from natural object to na object of comercial use. From the many species presente in the Garden, I chose five species endemic to the Atlantic Forest which, due to their history and comercial value, are today at risk of extinction.” Gabriela Albergaria, in the catalog for the exhibition “Nature Abhors a Straight Line”, Culturgest, Lisbon, 2020.
41 x 56 each (60 piece polyptych)
Laser engraving on wood and drawing printed on cotton paper Photo Ding Musa “This piece was developed from Tenente Siqueira Campos Park in São Paulo, better known as Trianon Garden. Each of the five diptychs is composed of a set of laser woodcuts from original drawings and of another set of inkjet prints. This piece addresses the passage from natural object to na object of comercial use. From the many species presente in the Garden, I chose five species endemic to the Atlantic Forest which, due to their history and comercial value, are today at risk of extinction.” Gabriela Albergaria, in the catalog for the exhibition “Nature Abhors a Straight Line”, Culturgest, Lisbon, 2020.
120 x 90 x 610 cm
Soil, truncks and leaves Photo Edouard Fraipont A sculpture created with earth, tree branches and tree leaves, Couche Sourde borrows its title from a technique of germinating tropical plant seeds in European soil. It was discovered that when the seeds are embedded in layers of soil interspersed by tree leaves and branches, enough heat is generated in this arrangement to provide for the seeds’ germination. Before this discovery, the plants used to travel from the New World to Europe in the form of seedlings, since the seeds did not find the right soil and climate to germinate in the Old World. Couche Sourde refers to this discovery and to this technique which allowed for the migration and proliferation of tropical plants on European soil. To construct the sculpture, Albergaria used an outer removable framework/mold, which she filled with local wood, soil, tree branches and tree leaves. The sculpture, measuring 600 cm x 120 cm x 90 cm, dialogues not only with the main themes dealt with by Albergaria in her oeuvre, that is, the cultural transfer brought about by the migration of plants and trees, but also with questions related to perspective as well as bi- and tridimensionality.
56 x 75 cm
Lambda print on Epson paper and green colored pencil on Hahnemühle 300g paper Photo Reproduction
76 x 100 cm
Lambda print on Epson paper and green colored pencil on Hahnemühle 300g paper Photo Reproduction
Variable dimentions
Tree trunks and branches, screws and cotton thread Photo Ding Musa
75 x 104,5 cm (11 piece polyptych)
Green colored pencil on paper Photo Ding Musa
75 x 56 cm
Digital photography – Lambda print Photo Reproduction
109 x 49 x 49 cm each
Wicker baskets Photo Jorge Silva These wicker baskets alude to originals designed by Thouin, the first gardener of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The original baskets were used to house and transport exotic plants on Lapérouse´s round-the-world expedition (1785-1788).” Gabriela Albergaria, in the catalog for the exhibition “Nature Abhors a Straight Line”, Culturgest, Lisbon, 2020.
Variable dimentions
Acacia branches, collected in the Lisbon region, cut and reassembled with a new morphology adapted to the site and hardware. Photo Jorge Silva

75 x 100 cm
Digital photography – Lambda print Photo Reproduction
Gabriela Albergaria’s work involves one territory: Nature. A nature manipulated, planted, transported, set in hierarchy, catalogued, studied, felt and recalled through the ongoing exploration of gardens in photography, drawing and sculpture.
The artist views gardens as elaborated constructs, representational systems and descriptive mechanisms that epitomize a set of fictional beliefs that are employed to represent the natural world. Gardens are also environments dedicated to leisure and study, cultural and social processes that produce a historical understanding of what is knowledge and what is pleasure.
More generally, the images of gardens and plant species employed by the artist are used as devices to reveal processes of cultural change through which visions of nature are produced. Mediated by representation systems they generate different versions of what we see as landscape—itself a complex system of material structures and visual hierarchies, cultural constructs that define the framing of our visual field.
Since 1999 Albergaria has exhibited regularly around the world. Recent solo shows and installations include Oréades, Embaixada de Portugal, Brasília (2021); Nature Abhors a Straight Line, Culturgest, Lisbon (2020), Intervenções X, Museu Lasar Segall, São Paulo (2018); Ah, al fin, naturalize, Flora ars+natura, Bogotá (2016); Two Trees in Balance, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2015); Being of the Yearly Rhythm, Museu da Luz, Portugal (2014–2015); and Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural, Caracas (2013).
Group exhibitions include Drawing Power. Children of Compost, Drawing Lab, Paris (2021); Zona da Mata, Contemporary Art Museum (MAC USP), São Paulo (2021); All I Want. Portuguese Artists from 1900 to 2020, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2021); Tree Time. Arte e Scienza, Museo Nazionale della Montagna, Torino (2019); Prickley, Tender and Steamy, Artists in the Hothouse, Wave Hill Garden, Glyndor Gallery, New York (2014); From Baroque to Baroque, Contemporary Art, House of Parra, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2013).
Residencies include the Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center (Winter Workshop 2012), Villa Arson, Centre National d’ Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2008) and the University of Oxford Botanic Garden in collaboration with The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford (2009/2010).
Gabriela Albergaria’s work involves one territory: Nature. A nature manipulated, planted, transported, set in hierarchy, catalogued, studied, felt and recalled through the ongoing exploration of gardens in photography, drawing and sculpture.
The artist views gardens as elaborated constructs, representational systems and descriptive mechanisms that epitomize a set of fictional beliefs that are employed to represent the natural world. Gardens are also environments dedicated to leisure and study, cultural and social processes that produce a historical understanding of what is knowledge and what is pleasure.
More generally, the images of gardens and plant species employed by the artist are used as devices to reveal processes of cultural change through which visions of nature are produced. Mediated by representation systems they generate different versions of what we see as landscape—itself a complex system of material structures and visual hierarchies, cultural constructs that define the framing of our visual field.
Since 1999 Albergaria has exhibited regularly around the world. Recent solo shows and installations include Oréades, Embaixada de Portugal, Brasília (2021); Nature Abhors a Straight Line, Culturgest, Lisbon (2020), Intervenções X, Museu Lasar Segall, São Paulo (2018); Ah, al fin, naturalize, Flora ars+natura, Bogotá (2016); Two Trees in Balance, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2015); Being of the Yearly Rhythm, Museu da Luz, Portugal (2014–2015); and Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural, Caracas (2013).
Group exhibitions include Drawing Power. Children of Compost, Drawing Lab, Paris (2021); Zona da Mata, Contemporary Art Museum (MAC USP), São Paulo (2021); All I Want. Portuguese Artists from 1900 to 2020, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2021); Tree Time. Arte e Scienza, Museo Nazionale della Montagna, Torino (2019); Prickley, Tender and Steamy, Artists in the Hothouse, Wave Hill Garden, Glyndor Gallery, New York (2014); From Baroque to Baroque, Contemporary Art, House of Parra, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2013).
Residencies include the Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center (Winter Workshop 2012), Villa Arson, Centre National d’ Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2008) and the University of Oxford Botanic Garden in collaboration with The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford (2009/2010).
Gabriela Albergaria
1965. Vale de Cambra, Portugal
Lives and works in Brussels and Lisbon
Solo shows
2024
– Underground. Ecosistemi da esplorare – Museo Villa dei Cedri – Bellinzona – Suíça
2023
– Gabriela Albergaria. Entre o céu e a terra há um compromisso de ternura – Parque de Alta Vila – Águeda – Portugal
– Gabriela Albergaria. Desperdícios – Galeria Vera Cortêz – Lisboa – Portugal
– CAM em Movimento: Gabriela Albergaria. Podemos seguir numa nova direção? – Praça do Centro Comercial Fonte Nova – Lisboa – Portugal
– Gabriela Albergaria. (…) uma única espécie (…) – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
2022
– Gabriela Albergaria. Making Soil – LMNO – Bruxelas – Bélgica
– Gabriela Albergaria. Lugares Restos – Venha a Nós a Boa Morte [VNBM] – Viseu – Portugal
– Gabriela Albergaria. Para onde agora? Where to now? Aller où maintenant? – Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC – USP) – São Paulo – Brasil
– Museu Municipal de Tavira – Tavira – Portugal
– Gabriela Albergaria. A Natureza Detesta Linhas Rectas – Museu Municipal de Tavira – Tavira – Portugal
– What is the Color of Green? – Maison du Portugal – Paris – França
2021
– Oréades – Embaixada de Portugal em Brasília – Brasília – Brasil
2020
– Gabriela Albergaria. Nature Abhors a Straight Line – Culturgest – Lisboa – Portugal
2019
– Nature’s Afterlives: Gabriela Albergaria & Jorge Otero – Pailos – Sapar Contemporary – Nova York – EUA
– Gabriela Albergaria: Land.Fill – Colégio das Artes – Coimbra – Portugal
– Gabriela Albergaria: an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant – Galeria Vera Cortêz – Lisboa – Portugal
– Gabriela Albergaria: vala e cômoro / Projeto O Chão das Artes – Casa da Cerca Centro de Arte Contemporânea – Almada – Portugal
2018
– Rasgo no Solo do Parque de Lazer do Castelinho (instalação permanente/permanent installation) – Parque de Lazer do Castelinho – Vila Nova de Cerveira – Portugal
– Gabriela Albergaria: Intervenções X – Museu Lasar Segall – São Paulo – Brasil
– Mesa dos sonhos: Duas coleções de arte contemporânea – Museu de Arte Contemporânea Nadir Afonso – Chaves – Portugal
2017
– Endless Infinity – Museu Grão Nacional Vasco – Viseu – Portugal
– Peça para Perséfone (em colaboração com Nuno Vasconcelos e Pedro Tudela) – Praça D. Duarte – Viseu – Portugal
2016
– Ah, al fin, naturaliza – Flora ars+natura – Bogotá – Colômbia
2015
– Terra Território – Sala Fernando Pessoa – Consulado Geral de Portugal – São Paulo – Brasil
– Ah, At Last Nature – Fórum Eugênio de Almeida – Évora – Portugal
– Gabriela Albergaria – Quadrum Galeria de Arte – Belo Horizonte – Brasil
– L’espace est une impasse où sont temps s’abolit (escultura permanente/permanente sculpture) – Kunstverein Springhornhof – Neuenkirchen – Alemanha
2014
– Ser do Ritmo Anual – Museu da Luz – Luz Mourão – Portugal
– O Balanço da Árvore Exagera a Tempestade – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Time Scales – Vera Cortês Art Agency – Lisboa – Portugal
– Projecto Contentore – Museu da Electricidade – Lisboa – Portugal
2013
– No hay tal cosa como la naturaleza – Carmen Araujo Arte – Caracas – Venezuela
2012
– Invertir la posición – Wu Galeria – Lima – Peru
– Counting Seeds – Ermida Nossa Senhora da Conceição – Lisboa – Portugal
– WAND 102,100 – Galeria de Arte Contemporânea – Castelo Branco – Portugal
2011
– Forking Paths – Vera Cortes Agencia de Arte – Lisboa – Portugal
2010
– Térmico – Pavilhão Branco – Museu da Cidade – Lisboa – Portugal
– Gabriela Albergaria – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
2009
– Um Plátano de Versailles – Espaço 3 ao cubo – Alfragide – Lisboa – Portugal
2008
– Variações sobre um Tema – Centro Cultural Vila Flor – Guimarães – Portugal
– FINALE: DIX – NEUF – Gabriela Albergaria + Lisa Harlev – Espace Surplus – Berlim – Alemanha
– ABRACADÁRVORE – Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMBA) – Salvador – Brasil
2007
– Araucária Angustifólia – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
2006
– Herbes Folles (Work in Progress) – Vera Cortês Agencia de Arte – Lisboa – Portugal
– 51 Avenue d’Iéna – Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian – Paris – França
– Indigenas y Exoticas – Liquidation Total – Madri – Espanha
– Under an Artificial Sky – Project Room – Art Forum Berlim Art Fair – Berlim – Alemanha
2005
– Mouvement – Instability – Conflito – Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra – Coimbra – Portugal
– Mouvement – Instability. Conflito II – Galerie Marianne Grob – Berlim – Alemanha
– Collect – transplantar – coloniser – Project Room – Centro Cultural de Belém – Lisboa – Portugal
2004
– Reconhecer – Um Lugar – AH – António Henriques Galeria de Arte Contemporânea – Viseu – Portugal
– Do Estádio Nacional ao Jardim da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian – Lisboa – Portugal
2003
– Grosses Werder – Werden Wollen – Galeria Graça Brandão – Espaço 552 – Porto – Portugal
2002
– Trabalhos Recentes – Galeria Promontório Arquitectos – Lisboa – Portugal
2001
– Exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien – studio III – Berlim – Alemanha
– DOPPEL 7 – Gabriela Albergaria / Morten Schelde – Galerie Kamm – Berlim – Alemanha
2000
– Desenho – Galeria Paula Fampa – Braga – Portugal
1999
– Rua Manuel Soares Pinheiro – parte V – Galeria Monumental – Lisboa – Portugal
1998
– Rua Manuel Soares Pinheiro – parte III – Galeria Assírio e Alvim – Lisboa – Portugal
1997
– Rua Manuel Soares Pinheiro – Museu Botânico de Lisboa – Portugal
1991
– Marcas D’Água – Galeria Pedro Oliveira – Porto – Portugal
1990
– Notas – Galeria Monumental – Lisboa – Portugal
Group shows
2024
– Éter – Galeria Venha a Nós a Boa Morte – Viseu – Portugal
– Underground. Ecosistemi da esplorare – Museo Villa dei Cedri – Bellinzona – Suíça
– 621 e todas nós. Mulheres artistas na Coleção do Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz – Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz (IFF) – Ribeirão Preto – Brasil
2023
– Or the continuous drawings. Drawings from the Teixeira de Freitas Collection – Museu de Arte Contemporânea (MAC) – Lisboa – Portugal
– Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize – Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes – Lisboa – Portugal
– A Revolução na Noite – Centro de Arte Oliva – São João da Madeira – Portugal
– Fantasma Gaiata – Culturgest – Lisboa – Portugal
– Visitante Ocasional – Centro de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra – Coimbra – Portugal
– Staffage – Lehmann+Silva – Porto – Portugal
– Eles falam em arco-íris – Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra – Coimbra – Portugal
– Natureza viva. Paisagem e sustentabilidade – Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga – Lisboa – Portugal
– Arte Ecológica. Árvore na Floresta do Cimento – Centro Cultural de Poiares – Poiares – Portugal
2022
– Outras Lembranças, Outros Enredos – Cordoaria Nacional – Lisboa – Portugal
– Ponto d’Orvalho – Herdade do Barrocal de Baixo – Quinta das Abelhas – Montemor-o-Novo – Portugal
– Festa. Fúria. Femina. – Obras da Coleção FLAD – Arquipélago – Centro de Artes Contemporâneas – Açores – Portugal
– Earth Power! – Montoro12 Gallery – Roma – Itália
– Tout ce que je veux. Artistes portugaise de 1900 à 2020 – Fondation Caloustre Gulbenkian / Délégacion em France – Paris – França
2021
– Drawing Power. Children of Compost – Drawing Lab – Paris – França
– Matter of Fact – Galerie Duchamp – Yvetot – França
– Zona da Mata – Museu de Arte Contemporânea (MAC USP) – São Paulo – Brasil
– Tudo o que eu quero. Artistas Portuguesas de 1900 a 2020 – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian – Lisboa – Portugal
– No reino das nuvens: os artistas e a invenção de Sintra – Museu de Arte de Sintra – Sintra – Portugal
– LAND HO! A landscape of found forms – Ponce+Robles – Madri – Espanha
2020
– O Palácio. 15 anos de arte contemporânea – Palácio Vila Flor – Guimarães – Portugal
– Tree Time. Arte e Scienza – Museo delle Scienze [MUSE] – Trento – Itália
– ProjectoMAP 2010-2020. Mapa ou Exposição – Museu Coleção Berardo – Lisboa – Portugal
– Detanico Lain + Gabriela Albergaria + Nuno da Luz – Galeria Vera Cortês – Lisboa – Portugal
– Earthkeeping / Earthshaking – Arte – feminismos e ecologia – Galeria Quadrum – Lisboa – Portugal
– Coleção Moderna – Museu Calouste Gulbenkian – Lisboa – Portugal
– O Desenho incerto – Cinco leituras do espaço – Galeria do Colégio das Artes da Universidade de Coimbra – Portugal
2019
– Tree Time – Museo Nazionale della Montagna – Torino – Itália
– The collection of Mr X – the man who lived 500 years – Galleria Alberta Pane – Veneza – Itália
– Mesa dos sonhos: duas coleções de Arte Contemporânea – Fundação Serralves – Porto – Portugal
– A metade do céu – Museu Arpad Szenes – Lisboa – Portugal
– Construyendo Historias – Lonja del Pescado – Alicante – Espanha
2018
– The Making of Landscape – Galerie Duchamp – Centre d’art contemporain de la Ville d’Yvetot – Yvetot – França
– diep~haven festival 2018 – Sheffield Park and Garden National Trust – Uckfield – Inglaterra
– Second Nature: Portuguese Contemporary Art from the EDP Foundation Collection – The Kreeger Museum – Washington DC – EUA
– Amazônia: Os Novos Viajantes – Museu Brasileiro de Escultura e Ecologia (MUBE) – São Paulo – Brasil
– Mesa dos sonhos: Duas coleções de arte contemporânea – Fundação Serralves – Porto – Portugal
– Inanimate Object – or the complete cicle of the soil – Sheffield Park and Garden National Trust – Sheffield – Inglaterra
2017
– Curar e Reparar – Anozero’17 – Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra – Coimbra – Portugal
– Out of Place – 60 Wall Gallery – Nova York – EUA
– Epitopou – Andros – Grécia
– Fazer Sentido – Casa da Cerca – Centro de Arte Contemporânea – Almada – Portugal
– Anticipándonos al Futuro – ARS Málaga – Málaga – Espanha
– Substance and Increase – SAPAR Contemporary Gallery – Nova York – EUA
2016
– Second Nature – Museu de Arte – Arquitetura e Tecnologia (MAAT) – Lisboa – Portugal
– Point of View (instalação semipermanente) – Parque da Pena – Sintra Portugal
– Linhas de Diálogo – Espaço Novo Banco – Lisboa – Portugal
2015
– Anozero’15 – Um lance de dados – Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra – Museu Botânico – Coimbra – Portugal
– Two Trees in Balance – Socrates Sculpture Park (Spring Summer Exhibitions) – Nova York – EUA
– Consequências do Olhar – Paisagens na Coleção MG – Espaço Adães Bermudes – Alvito – Portugal
– Às Margens dos Mares – SESC Pinheiros – São Paulo – Brasil
2014
– Everywhere is the same sky – Centro de Cultura Contemporânea de Castelo Branco – Castelo Branco – Portugal
– Pontos Colaterais: Coleção de Arte Contemporânea Arquipélago – uma seleção – Arquipélago Centro de Artes Contemporâneas – São Miguel – Açores
– Animalia e Natureza na Coleção do CAM – Fundação Caloustre Gulbenkian – Lisboa – Portugal
– Acervo – Artistas Portugueses em La Colleción Navacerrada – Madri – Espanha
– A vanguarda está em ti – Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra – Coimbra – Portugal
– Prickley – Tender and Steamy: Artists in the Hothouse – Wave Hill – Nova Iorque – EUA
– Do Barroco para o Barroco – está a Arte Contemporânea – Casa,Museu Guerra Junqueiro – Porto – Portugal
2013
– É Tropical – inclusive – Museu de Arte Moderna [MAM BA] – Salvador – Brasil
– Paisagem e Natureza na Arte Contemporânea Portuguesa – Museu de Évora – Évora – Portugal
– Do Barroco para o Barroco – está a Arte Contemporânea – Fundação Bienal de Cerveira – Cerveira – Portugal
– Encuentro y Dialogo – Patio Noble del Parlamento de Extremadura – Merida – Espanha
– Encuentro y Dialogo – Casa de la Cultura de Dom Benedito – Don Benedito – Espanha
– Encuentro y Dialogo – Museo de Santa Cruz – Toledo – Espanha
– As trama do tempo na Arte Contemporânea: Estética ou Poética – Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz – Ribeirão Preto – Brasil
– Encuentro y Dialogo – Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo [MEIAC] – Badajoz – Espanha
– Fingidos – Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa – Lisboa – Portugal
2012
– El Gran Sur – 1a Bienal de Montevideo – Fundacion Bienal de Montevideo – Montevideo – Uruguai
– Paisajes improbables – Museo de León – Castilla y León – Espanha
– Paisajes improbables – Galeria do Paço da Cultura – Guarda – Portugal
– Paisajes improbables – Sala Unamuno – Salamanca – Espanha
– Paisajes improbables – Monasterio de Nossa Sra – de Prado – Valladolid – Espanha
– Do Not Destroy: Trees – Art – and Jewish Thought – Contemporary Jewish Museum – San Francisco – EUA
– Outdoor Project – P28 – Lisboa – Portugal
2011
– Birdwatchers – BitForms Gallery – Nova Iorque – EUA
– Paisagem na Coleção do CAM – Fundação Caloustre Gulbenkian – Lisboa – Portugal
– Mostra de peças no Edificio da Fundação Caloustre Gulbenkian – Londres – Inglaterra
2010
– O Jardim como espelho – Goethe Institut – Lisboa – Portugal
– Livre Tradução – Galeria Vermelho – São Paulo – Brasil
– Ecólogica – Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM SP) – São Paulo – Brasil
– António Henriques Galeria de Arte Contemporânea – Viseu – Portugal
– Exposição #4 – BES – Finança – Lisboa – Portugal
– KURS: THE TREE – Fuglsang Kunstmuseum – Lolland – Dinamarca
2009
– Um Plátano de Versailles – Espaço 3 – Espaço ao Cubo – Lisboa – Portugal
– XV Bienal de V – N – de Cerveira – Fórum Cultural – Vila Nova de Cerveira – Portugal
– Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe – Tapada das Necessidades – Lisboa – Portugal
– Lá fora [artistas portugueses] – Museu da Eletricidade – Central Tejo – Lisboa – Portugal
2008
– BES Art – O Presente: Uma Dimensão Infinita – Colecção Banco Epirito Santo – Museu Colecção Berardo – Lisboa – Portugal
– Acclimatation – Villa Arson – Centre National d’Art Contemporain – Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art – Nice – França
– Intangible – Artecámara – ArtBo – Bogotá – Colômbia
– Lá Fora – Museu da Presidência da República – Viana do Castelo – Portugal
– Analema ou o Tempo Traduzido – Nova Cultura do Centro Hospitalar Psiquiátrico – Lisboa – Portugal
– O Desenho Dito – Casa da Cerca – Centro de Arte Contemporânea – Almada – Portugal
– Parangolé – Fragmentos desde los noventa en Brasil – Portugal y España Museo Patio Herreriano – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Español – Valladolid – Espanha
– The Tree: From the Sublime to the Social – Vancouver Artgallery – Vancouver – Canadá
– 5 Portuguese Artists – Michel Soskine Inc – – Madri – Espanha
2007
– Garten Eden: Der Garten in der Kunst seit 1900 – Kunsthalle in Emden – Emden – Alemanha
– O Gabinete de Curiosidades de Domenico Vandelli – Jardim Botânico de Coimbra – Coimbra – Portugal
2006
– Drawing Attention – Invaliden 1 – Berlim – Alemanha
– Group Show – AH – António Henriques Galeria de arte contemporânea – Viseu – Portugal
– Video’Appart – appartements privés – Paris – França
– Making Of – Liquidation Total – Madri – Espanha
2005
– But the Exciting Aspect is to Organize Matter ,55 international female positions toward sculpture Vienna AREA 53 – Atelier & Gallery AREA 53 – Viena – Áustria
– Die Zukunft Der Natur – Das Hotel – Landes Ausstellung 05 Salzlager Hall – Hall in Tirol – Innsbruck – Austria – Project from Via Lewandowsky (Artist, Berlim) and Piet Eckert (Architect, Zurique)
– Paisagens /Landscapes – Galeria Graça Brandão – Porto – Portugal
– BlueHall – Market Place Europe – at Kunsthalle Arnstadt – Alemanha
– Uma Extensão do Olhar – Obras da colecção PLMJ – CAV – Centro de Artes Visuais de Coimbra – Portugal
2004
– Fotossintese – Sintese / Synthesis Festival de Imagem de oeiras – Lagar do Azeite – Oeiras – Portugal
– antiIDYLL – (desenho/drawing “Grand Rocher“) – Suspace Contemporary Art – Berlim – Alemanha
– Morten Schelde & Gabriela Albergaria (desenho/drawing) – Suspace contemporary art – Berliner Kunstsallon – Berlim – Alemanha
– Landkunstleben – Fürstenwalde – Alemanha
– ZELT project – Schloss Wiepersdorf – Niederer Fläming – Alemanha
– Salon Europeén des Jeunes Createurs (Montrouge – Paris) Schwarzweiss IX – Galerie Marianne Grob – Berlim – Alemanha
2003
– 60 Artists at Pugh Pugh Gallery – Gallery Pugh Pugh – Berlim – Alemanha
– Acrochage – Galeria Graça Brandão – Espaço 410ª – Porto – Portugal
– A Room of One’s Own – desenhos/drawings – Museumsbygningen – Copenhagen – Dinamarca
– Et Puis Voilá – AH – António Henriques Galeria de Arte Contemporânea – Viseu – Portugal
– Blue Hall – Marketplatz Europa – Atelierhaus Panzerhalle e – V – Gross Glienicke – Berlim – Alemanha
– Project Dialog Loci in Kostrzyn – Kostrznskie Centrum Kultury – Polônia
– A Room of One’s Own – desenhos/drawings – Casa das Artes – Porto – Portugal
2002
– Let’s Crystallize – Galerie SPARWASSER HQ – Berlim – Alemanha
– Imago 2002 – Encuentros de Fotografía y Vídeo – Sala Unamuno – Centro de Arte de Salamanca – Salamanca – Espanha
– Expect the World/Moi Non Plus – Video Projection – Künstlerhaus Bethanien – Berlim – Alemanha
– Expect the World/Moi Non Plus – Video Projection – Museu do Chiado – Lisboa – Portugal
2001
– Ways of Worldmaking – Mucsarnok – Budapeste – Hungria
2000
– Mnemosyne Project – Encontros de Fotografia 2000 – Coimbra – Portugal
Activity as Teacher and Conferences
2017
Artist Talk II: Gabriela Albergaria e Diogo Pimentão – em conversa com Amber Moyles – curador assistente do The Drawing Center New York – Uma colaboração entre o Sapar Contemporary e Residency Unlimited – Nova York – EUA
2016
Ciclo de Workshops no Museu. A partir das obras presentes na exposição Segunda Natureza – MAAT – Lisboa – Portugal
– Uma colaboração entre o Sapar Contemporary e Residency Unlimited – Nova York – Sapar Contemporary – Nova York – EUA
2013
Artist Talk: Gabriela Albergaria – Nuno Henriques – Delfim Sardo – Porta 33 – Ilha da Madeira – Portugal
2011
Artist Talk: hither and thither – Modern Art Museum (MAO) – Oxford – Inglaterra
2008
Emily Talks: 2008 Spring Speaker Series – ECI – Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design – Vancouver – Canadá
2001
Rebuilding the mechanisms of feelings – ACC Galerie – KünstlerGärten Weimar e Bauhaus Universität Weimar – Weimar – Alemanha
1995/2000
Professora na escola de arte Arco Centro de Arte & Comunicação Visual – Lisboa – Portuga
Grants & residencies
2015
– FLORA ars+natura – Bogotá – Colômbia
– Residency Unlimited – Nova York – EUA
2012
– Winter Workspace (Artista residente/Artist in Residence) – Wave Hill a Public Garden and Cultural Center – Nova York – EUA
2009-10
– The University of Oxford Botanic Garden (Artista residente / Artist in residence) – in collaboration with The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art – Oxford – Inglaterra (Calouste Gulbenkian Grant)
2008
– Villa Arson (Artista residente / Artist in residence) – Centre National d’Art Contemporain – Nice – France (Projecto/project: Arboriculture – une pèpinière d’espèces greffées – 2008) –
– Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (Artista residente / Artist in residence) – Salvador – Brasil (Projecto/project: ABRACADÁRVORE e Uma raiz descoberta e protegida)
2004
– Cité Internationale des Arts (Artista residente / Artist in residence) – Paris – França – (Calouste Gulbenkian grant) – (Projecto/Project: livro de artista/artist book Herbes Folles)
2000/01
– João Hogan,Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Grant in the International Studio Programme (Artista residente/Artist in residence) – Künstlerhaus Bethanien – Berlim – Alemanha
1994
– Programa de intercâmbio / Exchange program with Artists International Exchange Porto/Bristol – Art Space Studios Bristol
1991-93
– Bolsa da /Grant from Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
1985-90
– Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto – Portugal
Prizes
2023
– IV Prêmio Projecto Artístico Destacado Fundação Millennium – Lisboa – Portugal
Public Collections
– Museu Nacional dos Açores – Açores – Portugal
– Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahía [MAM BA] – Salvador – Brasil
– Centro de Arte Moderna Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian [CAM] – Lisboa – Portugal
– Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra [CAPC] – Coimbra – Portugal
– Kunstverein und Stiftung Springhornhof – Neuenkirchen – Alemanha
Private Collections open to the Public
– Perez Collection – Miami – USA
– Oliva Creative Factory. Nucleo de Arte da Oliva – São João da Madeira – Portugal
– Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz – Ribeirão Preto – Brasil
– Fundación Coca-Cola Juan Manuel Sáinz de Vicuña – Madri – Espanha
– Madeira Corporate Services – Funchal – Ilha da Madeira – Portugal
– KFW Bankenngrupe – Frankfurt – Alemanha
– Lars Pahlman – Finlandia
– BESArt – Banco Espirito Santo – Lisboa – Portugal
– Coleção PLMJ – Lisboa – Portugal
– Coleção EDP Eletricidade de Portugal – Lisboa – Portugal
– Coleção Fundação PLMJ – Lisboa – Portugal
Gabriela Albergaria’s work embraces such a vast signifier – “Nature” – that it becomes more than ambiguous. She brings heightened involvedness to this first approach. On addressing manipulated, planted, transported, uttered, catalogued, hierarchized, researched, experienced and recollected nature, she plays with an unstable, restless factor, a palimpsest of history and a variety of stories. History and tale doggedly depend on the word, form, that is, a chain of diverse experiences within any instance of discourse, theory or practice. Besides “discovering” nature, man “explores himself” through nature.
Gabriela Albergaria chose to address this issue quite early in her course as an artist. Born in Vale de Cambra in 1965, at the age of fourteen, she began to commute between her home town and the city of Oporto – switching from urban and cultural life to another, more intimate life in the country. Later on, following her studies at the Oporto Faculty of Fine Arts, with senior lecturers Ângelo de Sousa and Álvaro Lapa, whose erudition and profound knowledge of art and philosophy left their indelible mark, she moved to Lisbon (1989) where she remained until moving to Berlin in 2000. The parallel that exists between writing, practical philosophy and objectual creation are the paradigmatic features of her process and the groundwork to her pieces.
Albergaria explores a distinctive feeling since the 18th Century (1) whereby man’s relationship with Nature is measured in terms of distance. This standpoint dictates that men who are submersed in nature (farmers, fishermen, the bon savage?) are completely unaware of this shifting, fluid, protean referent, which matches the Signifier. Albergaria has lived thither and hither, between nature in the country and nature in the city and literature, colonized nature, the “green patch”, the practice of gardening, which she has developed since her early childhood. Employing nature as her “material”, she has inflected its diverse expressions and how it is culturally and personally regarded.
The wide array of modalities that convey man’s encounter with nature takes on diverse forms and is somewhat like a system of codes. The title of her proposal for Centro Cultural de Belém’s project room induces this game of passage: Collect, Transportar, Coloniser (2004). Besides gathering several languages, it prompts several meanings and connotations, which reflect the outcome of the encounter and inexorable miscegenation between people, languages, species, that is, between code systems. “To collect” implies taxonomy; a grid of one’s investment in art or plants. “To transport” is the premise to the first verb; it implies a living being’s adaptation to other living conditions or the adaptation of an object to a different context. “To colonise”, the French word follows it’s English and Portuguese antecessors, is an explicit reference to Lapérouse’s expedition. It implies the history of nations and power. The artist’s impartial standpoint on adopting several languages and the implicit transnational motion that underlies these words compels viewers to evaluate all of the parts implied in the motion of extracting a being or thing from its “natural” context – of giving it a second nature. The exhibition’s title in itself suggests that observers should focus on the locations, people and objects of power, the political edifications of power, instead of words – the reality of re-adaptation and re-composition, rather than the utopian natural habitat. The strict classical side of discipline, her leaps into the past and her discovery of systems of encounter with nature sum up the radical contemporaneity of her work.
Man’s struggle against Nature is a state of mind, a historical perspective, a certain capacity to fictionalize. Nature can be a vector of instability as well as a profoundly, disturbing change; a menace to man with her fury, but also a means of arousing emotion. Nature in her undefined state of rage and calm dismembers into manifestations of the uncanny and the familiar, conformity and non-conformity. Camoens (2), on establishing this multiform, shifting state of Nature, integrated time and its changes (—), much like Gabriela Albergaria and her array of concerns:
The sweetest scenes will even offend in the absence of the beloved.
The beauty of these mountains, fresh as day,
The spreading shade these chestnuts green
The meadow-rivers with their gentle flow, [bestow,
Whence sadness all is banished far away;
The sea’s hoarse murmur and the landscape gay,
The setting sun that sinks the hills below,
The cattle gathered, loitering as they go,
Clouds that in air in gentle warfare play;
Nay all the charms that nature, e’en most rare,
In such variety for eye can spread,
Are anguish mere, if I behold not thee;
Without thee all are wearisome despair,
Without thee ever round me is there shed
In chiefest joys the chiefest misery.
(Camoens)
Albergaria’s work is elaborated in an extremely complex manner and is conceptually grounded on fields beyond art. The conceptual ramifications of her work are extremely stimulating because they encourage her audience to immerse into literature or the experience of nature without constantly dividing their attention.
Photography, sculpture, drawing, language, fiction
Due to its artificial light and memory, Gabriela Albergaria’s body of work in photography is entirely dedicated to the unnerving images of our gardens, our homes. I would like to begin with this first manifestation in her work, not because it is embodies a concern with time, bur rather because it is related to the schooling of her personal experience and her experience of Nature through childhood memories. To create an image today means that she returns to what she once was and how that picture has become deep-seated, the prototype of an emotion or experience. “Casa de Pássaros”, quite an unconventional birdhouse, was built by Albergaria to agglutinate the issue of housing. The house as a metaphor for the past and present, transposed into an unknown relative, a form of close alterity: the bird. She also added a mesmerizing perspective to it: the view from the top of a tree. (Roni Horn too has a series of pictures of several birds photographed from the back. They assume an unstable identity, close yet mysterious, almost like an elegant head of hair, unveiling a beautiful, sensuous form that is divested of any concrete sexual existence).
I am also referring to photography because this was when she first began to tap into sculpture. In fact, Albergaria had to build model gardens in order to take her pictures; in her own words, she “recreated them”. Rather than conform to a model, she tried to “re-create” her gardens. With these devices, she reinstates her memories and develops them, memory being her prime material. Little by little, she shifts the initial image, manipulating that space. I presume that this experience is informed by what she reads and the experiences that she has developed regarding the subject. Her pictures suggest artificial motion through space, the malleability of imagination and memory, elaborated in conjunction in order to fictionalize. They are almost guidelines for the viewer who is shrunken, like Alice in Wonderland, and left to venture in a place where reality and fiction merge: producing the spatial premises for an open-ended story to unfold. “Tenho 7 anos e o buxo dá-me pelos ombros” [I am 7 years old. The boxwood is already shoulder high] inaugurated this passage of experience – the memory of a fictional place, presented in 2000 during the Projecto Mnemosyne in Coimbra.
Albergaria began to display models with their pictures as soon as she realized that they invoked different moments to the formulation of an experimental, abstract space. The models dispose of a laboratory where a visual construct is realized within a dark, mysterious atmosphere. Here, an environment, an atmosphere is erected, in other words, a voyage through memory, brought up at a present, odd time, which is nevertheless compelling.
I have used the word “model” because Albergaria works with small-scale model gardens. The plants and bushes are carefully placed in rows, on mounds, in beds, around trellises, hung on lines, to suggest the layout of a garden, a forest, flower beds or simply a patch of green grass. The miniatures are placed on top of tables, on the floor or onto rickety shelves. They contain small-scale landscapes, a portion of the flora that inhabits the world which generously, yet reservedly, is open to observation and endearment, sheltered within a tiny room. Often enough, they are representations of gardens in becoming, shrubbery for planting. On the other hand, false grafting is an allusion to Nature’s instability, but also a suggestion of the second nature to all things.
Stimulated by his ceaseless reflection on magic and scientific reasoning, Claude Lévi-Strauss begins his extraordinary La Pensée Sauvage (1962) by venturing into the field of the visual arts. He thinks in terms of events and structures and, to simplify things, considers that science elaborates events on the basis of structures whereas the “bricoleur” (magic reasoning) elaborates structures through events. The artist works neither way but alludes (this is one of the most important features in Gabriela Albergaria’s body of work) to both of these universes. The visual arts, according to Lévi-Strauss, elaborate and provoke aesthetic emotion because they are “reduced models” or miniatures. He undermines the most obvious counterargument by explaining that the Cistean Chapel is a reduced model of what it represents: the unbounded universe.
It seems interesting to underscore that Lévi-Strauss firstly took an interest in the issue of scale. He noted that reduction – even in monuments (3) – is a form of greater expression; a structure that embraces what it represents. Above all else, the miniature is, first and foremost, that which is small enough to be handled, that which can be procured with the gaze, hand and body. In the case of the miniature applied to the work of art, Lévi-Stauss wraps his analysis by stating, “the intrinsic virtue of the reduced model is that it compensates for the fact that it renounces its sensible dimension in favor of an intelligible dimension” (4).
Far from wanting to apply Lévi-Strauss’ theory to the work of art, it seemed important to refer to the issue of intelligibility, but also to underline another concern, playfulness; this is the best way of addressing Gabriela Albergaria’s work, its moment of fruition. I have mentioned “play” in the philosophic acceptation of the word; experimenting with the aim of creating a form, a rule, of playing with knowledge without any particular purport. Models underscore the issue of handling – indispensable when creating a second nature – removing the artist’s work from the emotional and immaterial space of photography. Once this threshold has been overcome, Albergaria is free to decline the issues that she works with, the first being the rules of fruition that she creates.
But let us return to the issue of sculpture. Discovered during her passage from the model to the photographic image, sculpture has become an important concern in her work. Besides models, and for them, as was the case of the bird house, Albergaria makes use of existent objects, doubling them. “Escada”, presented at Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, repositions a ladder that was copied from the ones that the foundation’s gardeners use to access out-of-reach areas. Albergaria’s ladder forges an access to higher or exterior places that plants, unlike men, reach. With this discreet, powerful presence, she rouses another way of living and another way of experiencing inhabited architecture, alerting her viewers to the body’s performativity with regards to nature, a completely different way of being and looking. These copies – it is important that they be seen as doubles – ring the ready-made bell, that is, the poetic appropriation of an existent object, placed in a space of contemplation that is freed of function but that determines functionality. Albergaria in fact shifts these objects by bringing them into the museum’s arena. The fact that we are dealing with replicas takes her work once step ahead: it establishes a concrete field of fiction. Just like Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, she doubles our world and changes the rules therein. The world that is mirrored in her work has the same objects, but new rules of physics, unstable scales and word games. With these objects, Albergaria pushes us across the threshold that divides these two dimensions.
Deep-seated, personal memory finds a collective, historic echo in works such as Collect, Transportar, Coloniser. Baskets of plants, replicas of the ones used in Lapérouse’s ultimate expedition, are reproduced in a remarkable and sensuous manner, alluding to the entire Belém area, which is marked by the discoveries and discourse/ideology that stems thereof. Following the colonial route of a plant, its passage through continents, discloses the entire collective unconscious of the power and fascination of tropical plants and their familiar presence in “our” gardens. Collect, Transportar, Coloniser acquired a potent critical condition within the CCB’s context: a controversial building that bought pandemonium to the urbanistic link between present and past. The building was projected as if it had some sort of intrinsic quality that could somehow solve this standoff. The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, one of the Portuguese Manueline’s prime samples, was created from scratch by artists who regarded the rest of European from a side position. National priorities in fact saw the birth of issues such as cultural miscegenation and the affirmation of power, issues that had nothing to do with neighboring Italian or French developments. The Mosteiro thus marks specific power relations and manifestations of culture.
The originality of Albergaria’s sculptural methods is based on incorporating a specific kind of motion: the growth of a living being and how bodies develop in space. Verticality (namely the outdoor installation that Albergaria placed on trellises, repeating the ancient practice of nursing fragile plants) becomes a life support that is spatially determined around weight; verticality and gravity, the physical weight of a body, oppose each other. The introduction of this organic movement also affects her essentially cultural-based thoughts on mix breeding and appropriation – second nature. The growth of a tree tentatively takes place in space, with light and water, according to a law that obeys a system which adapts to the earth and its specific context. Culture is a form of second nature, but nature itself can also be architecture and drawing, depending on where you stand and how you relate to your footing.
Drawing mostly submits to this process of evaluating Nature in her work. Obeying a method that is far from naïf, a sort of cross-section, a visually complex composition that is structurally coherent, her drawings are the “natural” impulse of creative drawing. They are rigorously contained in their monochromy and line and seem to implicitly draw a pantheistic critique of Spinoza and Descartes, where man in Nature is “like an empire within an empire”. In other words, artificially disconnected from Nature, disconnected from its laws and the parallelism between spirit, mind and body or extension. Her drawings seem to demonstrate this incredible theory. They bring the register of a purely physical account of a manifestation in Nature: culture. But they also bring an almost mechanical field – drawing is recognized as a discipline of knowledge in the greatest of academic traditions – a remove, that of she who looks at herself as she draws, of she who looks at the mechanism that is her hand and observes the correspondence to her theme.
The different issues raised by Gabriela Albergaria’s work have this link in common, multifarious Nature, which thus takes on the form of models, drawing, photographs, documentation or historic contextualization. All of these expressions do not represent a hesitant range of talents, but inevitable, binding forms of expression: drawing, science, the manipulation of organic life, fiction, image. Although she sometimes seems to fall into the category of installation, Albergaria works hard at maintaining these contact zones with classical forms of visual expression such as photography, drawing and sculpture, but I would also gamble at the field of word and germination of fiction.
In Loco: the Jardim da Sereia and the CAPC
There are two essential aspects to the conception of Gabriela Albergaria’s project for the CAPC. On the one hand, an accident, a picture that she discovered by chance in a newspaper, as well as several others witnessed in forests after wind and thunderstorms. The second aspect is that the Jardim da Sereia, particularly a clearing she had in mind, had already been occupied with sculptures. This meant that it could no longer be used, for it would come into futile, unwanted conflict with the existing pieces. To counterbalance this, as in most of her drawings, the pictures that she took of this place spurred her drawings, which were subsequently invested with the vectorial representation of atmospheric motion.
Replete with history, the Santa Cruz Park or Jardim da Sereia is an ancient forest that used to belong to brothers from the Holy Cross of Coimbra. Besides the rich Botanical Gardens, whose rare, exotic specimens now inhabit the Portuguese colonies, for instance the islands of São Tomé, the garden’s foliage once offered its visitors substantial, much afforded shade. The Gulbenkian Foundation’s antique guide, the prestigious Guia de Portugal, describes the garden in the following manner: “Besides this sumptuous vestibule [Eugénio de Castro, the writer cited in the original text, referred to the park’s entrance as a ‘vestibule’], the park has a fine staircase with landings, small swells and seats decorated with tiles (…) that lead to the fountain in a hidden corner, many pleasant trails, a circular lake carefully surrounded by encircling trees, a games field (…) but the garden mostly offers rare, fragrant botany with its Laurel lanes (Laurus Indica), which were planted by Linck in the 18th Century as a means of meaningful prevention: ‘Come forth and admire Laurels from India and Goa in all their majesty’”.
If the architectonic appearance of the garden is pretty much the same (despite its growing decay), its flora was amply remodeled after a cyclonic gust of wind destroyed almost all available species in 1941, as well as those of Sintra and the Buçaco. This small catastrophe marked an ideological turn of events. The trees went from local or Mediterranean cultures to a more fashionable culture: the tropical and subtropical specimens that still exist today.
This picturesque, local story meets up with the artist’s own personal story. Albergaria had long been haunted by the image of torn trees, toppled in the street by the sheer force of the wind. The issue of the storm, the accident, the lifeless tree and the constitution of a new habitat began to take form. Besides being an historical garden within the city’s mesh, the Jardim da Sereia is also a point of passage from the city’s top to its bottom half. It is a hybrid place with strong memories, a historical plot with an active presence.
Albergaria has conceived her exhibition at the CAPC as an interior and exterior trail with signs, effects and manifestations of a natural catastrophe, inspired on her own personal and local story. The show is divided into three parts: storm, accident, motion / change. Its title serves to expand these more descriptive concepts, ranging from French to English, and finally Portuguese: Mouvement, Instability, Conflito, I.
The exhibition comprises a piece which will be presented in the form of an “accident” outdoors. Landkunstleben marks its first version. In this previous version, she partially buried a rotten tree that had been torn down by the wind. The “accidents” that determine this tree/work’s final destiny were its illness, the wind and the artist who ultimately buried it. In very much the same way, Albergaria will place a local tree in one of the Garden’s trails, as if it had been cut down for people to pass. Besides this mise-en-scène, the tree is an intruder from the past, a specimen that once prospered in the Garden. A placard with background information on the piece shall be placed in the vicinity of the work, elucidating it.
The philosophical virtues of accidents are boundless: the accident cannot be forecast. It is a logical category (the accident can affect or modify the subject, that is, it is part of the motion of a phrase and, therefore, in a situation, it is the component of change). In other words, from the perspective of the subject who undergoes a change, the accident is the normal passing of things. Accidents mark history, time and being for man– this emotional paradox marked Camoens, who troubled to express the normalcy and strangeness of change.
Nature and life’s driving force, accident, is an essential element of landscape architecture (5) today, where life is seen as change. Life is a system of balances and imbalances, of forces that fight and confront each other before reaching a temporary equilibrium. With this system of changes in mind, Gabriela Albergaria began to make drawings of a clearing that could no longer be occupied. Her “exercises in motion”, in her own words, insert atmospheric movement into the weather of her drawings. Loose, with units of colour that confront each other, her drawings refer to outdoor spaces in a fantastical way.
There is a substantial change in these drawings that conquers all other forms of expression in this exhibition. If movement, motion had already insinuated itself in an organic, temporally delayed suggestion in her work, it becomes quite clear with this newfound, almost parasitical presence. Her classical, contained drawing is freed, becoming invaded by abstract movements (motion is always a form of abstraction, a scheme, a way of jointly tracing space and time). This is the exhibition’s vector: catastrophe, abstraction, change in an established order.
Her photographs prolong this fictitious investment in the clearing that is portrayed in her drawings. Once again, Albergaria introduces an almost abstract motion into the heart of an arranged, structured landscape. Like the register of an event, she does not take pictures of the accident, but the inherent wonder and admiration of nature’s force as its affects the world we know. The habitual staged feeling that her photos inspire is replaced with the mise-en-scène of change’s absurdity, the altered landscape, accident. Her pictures continue to inspire a sense of artificiality that enables the observer to attain a sense of remove and analyze what is being observed, but this time round, she moves one step ahead in this fictional suggestion of a space that can be explored by the mind and memory of the body, with imminent destruction at bay. Without any definite cause, this is the destruction of the space of memory, which leads to a place where all mystery is solved.
Another even more enigmatic intervention takes place outside which literally inverts past and present: by polishing one of the marble pieces to the staircase, Gabriela Albergaria transports us to the time of Linck’s bucolic impressions. The garden was like this. Now, it is mirrored in the polished marble. In a flash, by applying this technique, this space and its sculptures have been recovered. The Jardim da Sereia has several layers of periods (numerous accidents) hidden beneath its surface: the local trees, the brother’s sports fields, its “French” decor, tropical flora, the decaying ornaments, sculptures of an exceptional artist from the nineties, Rui Chafes, and Gabriela’s intervention today. There is one difference: hers may be the last accident, but it is a simulated, conscious one.
1) Montaigne, in the 17th Century, is an additional reference. Nevertheless, political-utopian theories concerning a guiding ideal of Nature began to take form in the 18th Century. These ideals culminated in the 19th Century with Henry David Thoreau’s experience in the US, recovered further on by the hippie movement.
2) J.J. Aubertin, Seventy Sonnets of Camoens, London: C. Kegan Paul & Co. 1881, p. 121
3) Lévi-Strauss’ position on art was extremely conservative. He conveys the weariness of researchers who have studied forms of civilization where aesthetic use and fruition have always mingled, unlike the “Fine Arts”. Further ahead, Lévi-Strauss affirms that abstract painters show what it would be like if they really painted – in other words, abstract painting as a mere issue of technique which artists fool about with.
4) Translated by the author.
5) “(…) On plante une graine et on attend. Il se passe alors des choses, pas forcément celles que l’on prévoit. Souvent, les prévisions sont déjouées par la biologie, dont on ignore beaucoup de choses. L’imprédictibilité est ce qui caractérise la vie (…)”. Gilles Clément conceived the “garden in motion”, that is, the André Citroën Park in Paris.
http://www.nouvellescles.com/Entretien/GClement/Clement.htm
Artifice-Reason-Nature may seem, perhaps, a strange confluence of contrary and not immediately relatable propositions. But the creative work of Gabriela Albergaria strives always for reconciliation between what might at first appearance suggest the contrary aspects of art and nature. Her current project installation based on the Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island), Wansee, near Berlin, is yet again another of these subtle interventions and appealing propositions. Gabriela Albergaria has frequently sought to express issues of the Enlightenment Garden – a product of artifice and reality – as it has become mediated through subsequent stages of industrial and post-industrial manifestation. The Pfaueninsel project departs from the site of the Palm House (destroyed by fire in May, 1880), and built by the architect Albert Dietrich Schadow (1797-1869). The son of Friedrich Gottlieb Schadow (1761-1831), director of public works and palace building commissioner, he thereafter became an architectural follower of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), having met and worked with Schinkel on the New Pavilions in the Park at Charlottenburg Palace, in 1824-25. Thereafter, Albert Dietrich Schadow executed the Palm House, Pfaueninsel in the years 1829-31, following closely a draft design by Schinkel. Some indication through engravings and a painted record of the interior of the Palm House still exist, the latter executed between 1832-34, by the Cottbus-born artist Carl Eduard Ferdinand Blechen (1798-1840). The relevance to Albergaria being the use of iron and glass structures, something which cast the pretence of pseudo-natural reality within an early industrial framework. In this sense the Palm House represented an early example of the interface between industry and nature.
The development of Palm Houses and Greenhouse structures typified the newly formed industrialisation of nature in the nineteenth century, with its artificial interface and pseudo-natural elements. The Pfaueninsel itself, and by extension from the eighteenth century landscape and garden environments, elaborates a similar sense of faux-nature. This is articulated through the history and construction of follys (pseudo-buildings, found on the Pfaueninsel), where allusions to the past were increasingly placed under the rubric of a fanciful tableau or, later on, the full scale diorama (the term was first coined by Louis Daguerre in 1822). This penchant for the exotic thereafter turned into a full blown mid-nineteenth century Orientalism, but the Palm House was also allied to the eighteenth and nineteenth century developments of places like the Berlin Botanical and Zoological Gardens (origins 1679, and 1844 respectively). Albergaria thus engages with a complex matrix of interelated ideas, and these ideas not only play with the naturalness of artificiality, but through plant and environmental adaptation how the processes of the naturalisation of artifice takes place. However, her works must be read through the language of art, and not specifically that of science, though the artist never denies such scientific explanations as might exist. The questions posed by Albergaria remain open. Does what was artificially formed and conceived become increasingly natural to our psychically disposed use of modern consciousness? As a result, and given the nature of the diverse plants that once existed in the Palm House, issues of transplantation and colonialism are tested. By further implication, also a complex of historical, social, and political processes, are highlighted through her drawing and photographic installations. The fact that plant environments adapt over time delivers a sense of fictional reality to that which is born of artifice.
Gabriela Albergaria in all instances follows the pattern of historical research and development, thus her knowledge and documentary history of the Palm House, Pfaueninsel is a given aspect in her undertaking. But the actual departure of the idea for Under an Artificial Sky, is also linked to earlier works as in this instance the Cestos (Wicker Baskets) first exhibited in her project Collect, Transplantar, Coloniser, shown at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, in 2004/2005. These baskets have an associative history as to the portering of plants from their previous (and sometimes exotic) locations, to their artificially constructed environments in Europe – in this instance by reference to the Palm House, Pfaueninsel. They act therefore as a metaphor of transplantation, and are based on the original baskets first conceived by the famous French Jardin des Plants botanist and gardener Thouin in Paris – they were used for the expedition with Lapérousse (1785-1788). But more than that, and since they are themselves made of fibrous plant life, they double as a form of reference to adaptation and plant hybridity. This also reminds us of themes like grafting which also appear frequently elsewhere in Albergaria’s body of work.
The project Under an Artificial Sky, thus begins with the basket-reference and these form part of the installation. The main aspects, however, are large scale coloured pencil drawings developed through several parts (280 x 400cm), and are deliberately the basis of a fictionalised landscape. These are accompanied by drawings showing a variety of ornamental-decorative plant motifs used in architecture. In this case we find an immediate juxtaposition of artificial landscape, placed next to the hieratic and stylised abstractions from palms. The industrialisation of exotic motifs and pattern books were to have an enormous influence over architecture in the nineteenth century. On the walls of the installation there are also a series of placed texts, an approach Albergaria used previously with her gallery in Lisbon, and in a recent exhibition at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris. References to Goethe and botanical taxonomy apply, but in reality these quotes expose the hidden colonial intentions that lay behind the nineteenth century obsession with glasshouses, and their application and use in the service of industrialisation. One has only to think of the later but legendary Crystal Palace where the Great Exhibition took place in London, in 1851. Apart from their exotic contents, the plants appropriation and transportation to Europe was primarily economic, revealing almost exactly the same motivations of human exploitation and transportation from the colonies. As a Portuguese artist, Albergaria is ever aware of her own country’s role in the playing out of colonialism. One of the quotes reveals matters explicitly “The economic use of the various species of palms by the colonial powers was an important reason for their inclusion in the botanical collections and winter gardens of the nineteenth century.” While the scale of the Palm House was modest 109′ x 46′ x 46′, the nature of translation and adapted use integrates a hidden history and reveals many forgotten motives that often lay behind the industrialisation of nature, these being familiarly expressed through artificial landscaping and garden-related environments.
Though Gabriela Albergaria project-works always suggest something of a gentle intervention, on closer inspection we find a distinctly subversive content is commonly exposed, “the visitor often got the impression that his country had taken possession of whole continents full of these palms….” The artificial contents of how the modern mind comprehends the natural is challenged in all her works, as is the striking feature of how these plant forms have themselves adapt to new environment and habitats of botanical colonisation. One is reminded somewhat of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) – who is often seen as the father of modern genetics – and his famous text ‘Experiments With Plant Hybridization’ (1865). Thus a whole platform of associative ideas emerge from these early developments in economic exoticism. The industrialisation of nature, its artificial beginnings, creates a raft of free-floating associations. It is not my intention to suggest Albergaria implies all these avenues as explicitly intended, but like all artists the open question of form and function is inevitably brought into view. Hence the photo/drawings that are also part of the installation, and which derive from the Berlin-Dahlem Botanic Garden, are devoted to issues of plant geography. Indeed, though I mention them last, they form the key to all the other contents of the project. A key because they are primarily and deliberately artificial (an artist’s drawing practising artifice) and mechanical (the camera as a recording mechanism). The Enlightenment and modern science is purportedly driven by reason, but the route as to how it is achieved is at the same time deeply embedded in artifice and nature. Gabriela Albergaria by looking closely at the desiderata of the past – the lost Palm House of the Pfaueninsel – has been able to open up a nexus of ideas that show that artifice-reason-nature far from being dissonant are all too intimately connected.
During the past few years, the artist Gabriela Albergaria has been developing a line of work that takes gardens and their history as a departure point for her interventions.
Using photography, drawing and installations (sometimes even sculpture), the artist builds models of situations that evoke gardens.
The raw material for these gardens comes from several sources of inspiration.
On the one hand it is in her own investigation about the history of gardens, whether botanical gardens or leisure gardens, where she finds historical, ideological and political references that map the colonization and that testify to the colonial past of Europe, specially that of Portugal. On the other hand, these social and collective references intercross with personal and subjective memoirs of her intimate experiences that sometimes appear to be autobiographical.
In the course of Gabriela Albergaria ‘ s development, a particularly significant moment came during her residence in Berlin, in the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, in the year 2000, when she constructed her first models of gardens. Those models originated from drawings that related more to childhood memory than to the garden as a device.
The artist wanted to evoke in the spectator the memory of the landscape of a garden in the perception of a child.
That landscape dimension was quickly transformed into a device that, far from referring to an anodyne organization of the world, is in fact, a symptom of a specific perspective about the organization of the visual universe – in other words, of the world.
The garden in Post-Renaissance Europe is an expression of the rationalism where the entertaining character links up with the exhibition of knowledge and a particular vision of the world and nature.
This theme is also dealt with in the intervention that Gabriela Albergaria has conceived for the Project Room of the Centro Cultural de Belém.
Under the title “Collect, transplantar, coloniser” a thematization programme of the migration and colonization is established and shown through the recollection activity of the artist.
Departing from the locale of the CCB in a context loaded with the History of the Discoveries and of colonization, the project is linked to the nearby Tropical Garden, in a reflection concerning the migration of species that ends by defining “natural” identities originating from historical, social and political processes. Sometimes, those identities that we take for granted and “static” are in fact fluid and even recent, the result of contamination processes that are up to us to understand and, eventually, consider as structuring.
The intervention makes references to a greenhouse – a place for the cultivation of nature (with every contradiction held within this sentence) and includes a larger tree (an elm) that the artist has dismantled and rebuilt according to her own rules of metamorphosis, creating a new composite and abused tree.
It is important to refer that this tree had died and was marked for felling by the Lisbon Municipality, and that its recollection in the city was carefully articulated with the authorities.
The project of Gabriela Albergaria also enters in dialogue with the garden that flanks the exhibition room, in a relationship that points out the complex mongrel character of our relationship with the natural space, or its mimesis.