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A spider with a hard-on, a spinach full of magic, a Russian serf sees himself as a reprobate*
(*caption from a drawing by Gonçalo Pena)
The online exhibition Barbearia… brings together a new selection of drawings from Gonçalo Pena’s undisclosed box of graphical oddities. The drawings exhibited in this photonic showing are accompanied by short and extra-descriptive notes written by João Maria Gusmão and fellow Pena enthusiast Chris Fitzpatrick to guide your virtual perusal of this artist’s idiosyncratic approach. These works will additionally be the subject of a forthcoming monograph published by Mousse Publishing (with texts by Alexandre Estrela, Gabriel Abrantes, Pedro Paiva and João Maria Gusmão) printed for the occasion of an exhibition at the Serralves Museum in Porto this summer.
Gonçalo Pena (b. 1967) is a cult figure within the Portuguese art scene who currently lives and works in Lisbon. Trained as a painter, Pena holds a PhD in Communication Sciences and has done extensive research on design theory and meta-design. He teaches painting, drawing and theory at a range of university-level institutions in Portugal and is considered an influential art professor for a younger generation of Portuguese artists. After a distinguished career in editorial illustration for major Portuguese newspapers and magazines during the 1990s, Pena started showing his work more regularly as a visual artist from the mid-2000s, with major solo shows at ZDB, curated by Natxo Checa, and at Graçabrandão Gallery, both in Lisbon, Galleria Zero, Milan, as well as several projects at Kunstverein München in 2016. Since 2014, Mousse Publishing has published Pena's graphic work in monographic volumes edited by João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva.