Culture

Lisbon brings together 120 years of art made by mostly unknown women

Lisbon (Portugal), Jun 6 (EFE) .- (Camera: Irene Barahona) Aurélia de Sousa observes from her self-portrait the visitor of "Tudo o que eu quero" (All I want), an exhibition in Lisbon that brings together 120 years of art in which the woman has not been a muse, but an author.FOOTAGE OF THE EXHIBITION AT THE CALOUSTE MUSEUM IN LISBONSOUNDBITES FROM BRUNO MARCHAND, CURATORTRANSLATIONI would say that within the first half of the 20th century it is practically impossible to go through it without talking about Aurélia de Sousa, who is the first artist in the exhibition and who makes an important temporal marking, because the frontal self-portrait from 1900 is piece zero. of this exhibition. The entire exhibition is built from that piece. Because we identify that very direct visual confrontation with the viewer as a change in the habitual transit of the gaze in modern art. And when I say modern I mean from the Renaissance to the present day. The woman was extraordinarily present in art but as a muse. Therefore, the representation of the woman's body was highly visible but was the object of the male artist's gaze. And in a way it was a demanding look. The body was the object of a gaze but did not own that power of the gaze. What she does with that portrait is to remove everything from the portrayed scene that was not the gaze of the artist herself. Her body, which she says is present, and which is not the object of a man's gaze but is in the power of that gaze. And she confronts us as spectators in the capacity of the author.There is a moment of investment and conquest of that power to look, to say and to create that for us is a founding moment in the history that we want to tell with this exhibition, which is a story of self-determination of women artists. Our great challenge was how to make an exhibition that was fair to the works and that started from their natures for an intergenerational dialogue with artists who work in very different media and that in the end could turn out to be a good exhibition and not just a small presentation of cores of parts