Daniela Guerreiro's Petunia (2023), oil on canvas
At day's end, women, who share nothing else but their gender, arrive home. In their sanctuaries, they remove their common bond: the vestiges of the outside world such as makeup and brassieres.
Daniela Guerreiro captures these intimate moments with her paintbrush in oil. Her exhibition, Janela Indiscreta, is at the Museu Municipal de Coimbra/Edificio Chiado on the pedestrianized Rua Ferreira Borges until January 19. Miguel Pinheiro's (Pressão), composed of colored impressions of his linocuts and other pieces also are on exhibit, but it ends later on January 26.
In a way, both exhibits, at least in part, highlight the pressures of life.
Daniela Guerreiro, who was born in 1992, explains her show on her Facebook page:
"The bedroom is where we experience moments of greater freedom, intimacy and disconnection from social filters. The gesture of unhooking our bra or appreciating our bodies in the mirror works as a powerful metaphor, representing the relief of freeing ourselves from imposed standards of socially accepted bodies and behaviours, allowing us to reconnect with our true essence."
"Each painting is a dive into a private space that highlights what one would rather hide in public contexts, and seeks beauty in imperfection," says Margarida Mata, in the exhibition notes.
Daniela Guerreiro's Calliandra (2023), oil on canvas
The Faro native describes her style as figurative realism in an interview with Laboratorio de Actividades Criativas (LAC) in Lagos during her Artistas Unidos em Residencia there in 2024. Since 2002, LAC has been promoting an annual competition for the use of studios in its space, a former prison.
"Themes on social media have changed the concept of what it is to be a real woman," says Daniela Guerreiro. The painter studied Visual Arts at the University of Algarve and Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon, according to her website.
Daniela Guerreiro's Janela Indiscreta at the Museu Municipal de Coimbra/Edificio Chiado in the Galeria Almedina
The artist's work is in direct opposition to this "tampering" on the Internet. She paints her subjects, exactly as they appear, with stretch marks, bra strap shoulder dents and all.
In Miguel Pinheiro's show, (Pressão), one of the colored impressions of his linocuts on Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in Cyrillic
Also on exhibition at the Museu Municipal de Coimbra/Edificio Chiado is (Pressão). It is a collection of colored impressions of linocuts of subjects of nature on the pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in Cyrillic. There is an elucidating video of landscape architect Miguel Pinheiro creating the impressions and other pieces in the show, which Arganil Municipality had exhibited in the autumn of 2024.
"These works are done when I have no pressure, when I don't have to work on other projects, and they are done without any pretension," municipality councillor Miguel Pinheiro told A Comarca de Arganil (September 26, 2024). Although he took arts courses in secondary school, he said that he did not study this technique.
"It's my own investment and dedication, and I've been delving deeper into this technique over the past five years. At the moment, it's the one I dedicate myself to the most."
The choice of “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoyevsky was not based on the fact that it is a literary classic, but rather on the graphic potential of the Cyrillic alphabet and its ability to freely associate the linocut with a story, an illustrated narrative, because its meaning is less understood, according to the exhibit notes.
The book was published in 1971, Miguel Pinheiro's year of birth. For the artist, it represents the 18,262 days lived in his first 50 years. In a digital print, Pinheiro represents the days with the same number of repetitions of his fingerprint across 50 lines and 365 (or 366) columns. He can be seen making this print in the video. The result shows the scale and texture of time and the difference in pressure to which our days subject us.
Admission is free to the Museu Municipal de Coimbra/Edificio Chiado located at Rua Ferreira Borges, 85. The opening hours are Tuesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
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