Contemporary Artists from Portugal
Imago Mundi - Luciano Benetton Collection

Texts by Luciano Benetton, Fernando Francés, Filipa Casulo

A kaleidoscopic parade of Portuguese art through the works of more than 200 contemporary artists: both young talents fresh from the country’s leading academies and established masters of colour present in the most prestigious biennials. Varied aesthetic approaches (from photography to the figurative in all its nuances, from the conceptual to mixed-media, to the three-dimensional and geometric abstraction); in common, their sights set firmly on the future and a pride in a past that is as rich in magic as it is in the contradictions of a great history. “Portuguese art signifies an art from Portugal that has nothing Portuguese about it, so as not to imitate what is foreign”, wrote the great Fernando Pessoa. “Being Portuguese, in the proper sense of the word means being European without the bad form of nationality.”

Portugal: Open Window to the World is an Imago Mundi collection, a cultural, democratic, global, non-profit project, promoted by Luciano Benetton with the aim of creating the widest possible mapping of the different contemporary artistic experiences of our world. In Imago Mundi, each country is represented by the works of established artists and new talents, commissioned with the maximum freedom of expression, whose only constraint is the 10x12 cm format.

www.imagomundiart.com is the web platform of the entire project