Appleton Recess (with Ana Hatherly, Pedro Diniz Reis and Sara Graça)

Bio Recess #4

APPLETON RECESS is a series of collective exhibitions, launched in 2010, based on curatorial premises that prioritize the encounter between generations of authors, artistic programs and different means of production. Each edition features works by three artists, the selection of which aims to establish a dialogue – sometimes even a confrontation – between pieces specifically developed for this event and others that recover some of the less accessible production of the last decades of Portuguese art. All exhibitions are accompanied by a publication that brings together texts, visual essays or other documentation, and which is seen as an autonomous body that seeks to expand or complement the exhibition experience.

For its fourth edition, the Appleton Recess project seeks to develop a web of relationships based on the use and appropriation of language as a plastic, signic and symbolic material. As in previous editions, the current exhibition project will start from a selection of works by a historical artist, Ana Hatherly (1929-2015), to articulate them with two distinct groups of works: on the one hand, a set of works with which Pedro Diniz Reis (1972) explored, in the late 2000s, visual and sound compositions of concretist inspiration, sensorial and strongly immersive; on the other, a group of works by Sara Graça (1993), some of them commissioned specifically for this meeting, which allow us to delve deeper into other lines of confluence between these different bodies of work, such as the incorporation of vernacular materials or a certain tendency towards the dissolution of signs and of every representative output in the territory of abstraction.

Bio Ana Hatherly

Ana Hatherly (8 May 1929 – 5 August 2015) was a Portuguese academic, poet, artist, essayist, filmmaker, painter and writer. She was considered one of the pioneers of the experimental poetry and experimental literature movement in Portugal. She graduated in Germanic philology from the University of Lisbon and received her doctorate in Hispanic studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and was also trained in film and music. Hatherly was a professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the New University of Lisbon, where she founded the Institute of Portuguese. Her work has been exhibited nationally in institutions such as the Modern Art Center of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Museu do Chiado, and the Serralves Foundation, and internationally in major events such as the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennale (Brazil).

Bio Pedro Diniz Reis

Pedro Diniz Reis (Lisbon, 1972)
Lives and works from Lisbon.

Graduated in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon in 2000.

At the beginning of his artistic career he created a series of video works related to his interest in the theme of fetishism as an expression and sublimation of desire, which culminated in an exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation as part of the SlowMotion project. At the end of 2003, following on from this body of work, the artist began learning the techniques of shibari, the Japanese word for ‘tying up’, which also designates a practice that is deeply rooted in the subculture linked to fetishism and sadomasochism. In 2005, he gave a stripped-down performance at the Cristina Guerra Gallery in Lisbon, in which shibari was emancipated from the cultural and aesthetic codes of its original context, to gain extraordinary resonance as a work of sculpture and in the light of the history of the nude in Western art. The presentation was repeated in 2016 at Culturgest, Lisbon.From 2004 onwards, he began working with linguistic signs as abstract, purely significant matter, and applying predetermined rules for organising these elements, the artist created a series of visual and/or sound compositions (using video, sound and books as media) that induce a strongly immersive experience. The video installation ‘Alphabet (Portuguese)’, presented at Appleton in 2008, stands out for its diagrammatic abstractionism, based on pre-existing space-time quantification systems or data collection methods. Also ‘Livro dos AA’, 2010, published as part of Diniz Reis’ exhibitions at Culturgest (Porto and Lisbon), in which his work with linguistic signs takes the form of letters, sounds and written or spoken words, forming rhythms and compositions. Although the artist has continued to work with this body of work ever since, it has also developed into performance and a series of other video installations.

Bio Sara Graça

Sara Graça (Lisbon, 1993) lives in London and works in an interdisciplinary way, using sculpture, drawing, photography and video. Her practice often questions ideas of value, authenticity and subjectivity. She graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Porto (2015) and did her MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College (London, 2024). Recent exhibitions include New Contemporaries (ICA, London, 2025); La Mafia de Las Flores (Ángeles Baños Gallery, 2025); New Contemporaries (MIRROR, PLymouth, 2024); Drawing (Eye to Pencil, London, 2024); SingSong (ZDB, Lisbon, 2024); MFA Degree Show (Goldsmiths, London, 2024); Bodies of Resistance (Pedro Cera, Lisbon, 2023); Neyeyeght (Francisco Fino, Lisbon, 2023); Ana, Tina, Sara, Ben (Ampersand, Lisbon, 2022); Novas Novas Cartas Portuguesas (Galeria Quadrum, Lisbon, 2022), Warhol, People and Things (Casa de São Roque, Porto, 2022), Bisi Bisi (Uma Certa falta de Coerência, Porto, 2022); B Blossoms (MALA, Lisbon, 2022);

No inferno às 9 (Galeria Solar, Vila do Conde, 2021); Clube-Estrada-Praia (Spirit Shop, Lisbon, 2021); Ratazanas e Calendários (Sismógrafo, Porto, 2020), among others. The artist also works in the context of music and her collaborations have taken the form of performance with Toda Matéria (presented at CCB, Passos Manuel, Galeria Quadrum, Cosmos, Out.Fest, ZDB, Lehmann/Silva), stage installations with Maria Reis (Teatro do Bairro Alto and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian) and the production of music videos for Maria Reis, Princ€ss, Luar Domatrix and Gala Drop. Sara founded Vésta (Porto, 2015-2016).

HCI / Colecção Maria e Armando Cabral / / /