MATRIZ: SOLO SHOW BY SUSANA CEREJA

18 July - 14 September 2024

Overview

The exhibition MATRIZ by Portuguese visual artist Susana Cereja, showcasing 17 mostly unpublished works, including the monumental and iconic pieces “Matriz,” “Boadicea,” “Hide & Seek,” and “Helia,” created by the artist over the past three years.

The exhibition reflects the multidisciplinary nature of a creative process where research, diversity, and versatility of media play a predominant role. Through this, Susana Cereja offers a renewed perspective on the revival and development of ancient artistic production methods, with a central focus on drawing and the Arraiolos stitch technique - traditionally used in the production of Portuguese tapestries - which the artist brings into the field of contemporary art, restoring it to its former place of excellence in local culture.

Susana Cereja creates a space of intricate connections between past and present, presenting work infused with technique, tradition, history, and collective memory. This discursive technique of community labor becomes, in this context, a vehicle for mythological reinterpretation, where stories of deities and primordial forces are interwoven, contributing to the allegorical construction of new myths in contemporary times, woven into the fabric of human consciousness.

"Matriz" is a conceptual space where we are invited to contemplate visually, emotionally, and intellectually the origins of life and creativity and to reconsider our own origins and the communal threads that unite us.

Through the works that comprise it, we traverse, piece by piece, the different disciplines and techniques that Susana Cereja has evoked year after year, and within the exhibition, we ultimately reach the piece that gives it its name and in its composite complexity and three-dimensionality, assumes the place and condition of genesis and epilogue.

CATALOGUE

Works