Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art

IT SHOULD BE Never leave Portugal without going to Porto. Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Museum and the Pena Palace at nearby Sintra are on every cultural tourist’s itinerary and must not be missed. But Porto is equally important for the multidisciplinary Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the top one hundred museums in the world with 1.3 million visitors every year.

The city it inhabits is a work of art in itself: Porto’s tall, colorful, historic buildings teeter precariously on the steep rocky banks of the Douro gorge, overlooking the mouth of the river. The Douro gushes into the city, swirling under six vast and impressive bridges—including one designed by Gustave Eiffel—to the point where fresh water meets the Atlantic Ocean. Centuries-old Port wine lodges line the south side of the river, boats plough up, down, and across the water, and bright flowers and lush foliage are everywhere. In the heart of this spectacular setting sits Serralves.

Serralves is more than a museum. It has forty-five acres of gardens and a park featuring sculptures from the collection, amid which stands a ravishing pink art deco villa, Casa de Serralves. So central to the cultural life of the city and its visitors is this entire ensemble that, in 2012, it was classified as a national monument. Designed by the Pritzker award-winning modernist architect Álvaro Siza Vieira, the museum was inaugurated in 1999 and contains large, light, airy, and versatile galleries well-suited to the complexity of its wide-ranging contemporary art displays. Exhibitions are assigned to showcase artists at a ratio of one-third Portuguese to two-thirds international, a proportion that is similarly reflected in the permanent collection.

The Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira presents thematic and monographic films throughout the year and holds conferences about contemporary cinema alongside educational programs. The space includes an auditorium for lectures, music, dance, and performances, and a comprehensive library. The new Poente Building, also by Álvaro Siza Vieira, will increase exhibition space by 40 percent, with a reserve capacity of 60 percent to store archives.

As a comparison, the overall atmosphere of Serralves is not unlike that of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. This is not mere coincidence because both institutions have benefitted from the stewardship of a highly animated, dedicated, and enthusiastic director, Philippe Vergne.

Displays of art take multiple forms designed to both confront and comfort the audience, and to emphasize first and foremost the dignity and care of artists while respectfully stretching the limits of their creativity. A recent example is micro | macro [pavilion] by Japanese artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda, who was invited to conceive a project for a temporary pavilion in Serralves Park. The result was a cinematic experience in an immersive environment of sound, silence, and penetrating digital imagery of mathematical mapping, all wildly flashing and pulsating on a ceiling screen reflected on a mirrored floor. Viewers’ reactions range from feeling soothed to experiencing sensations of panic and claustrophobia (there are warnings!).

Other artists include Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, a collaborative duo who live and work in Puerto Rico showing Entelechy (through October 29, 2023); and António Júlio Duarte, whose exhibition Fever (through November 12, 2023) was designed specifically for the Serralves galleries and the Villa’s chapel. Fever comprises fifty photographs and a large-scale work on fabric of the work Queimado. A major exhibition currently on view and running until January 2024 is of the block-buster variety: Joan Miró / Alexander Calder: Space in Motion. Following this will be a show exploring the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, ending forty years of dictatorship in Portugal.

Serralves is an exciting and inspiring place requiring a certain amount of intellectual gymnastics to take in the diversity of offerings available. A program covering such a wide spectrum of choices enables visitors of all kinds to see and hear themselves represented.