Julião Sarmento: Arena | Adrian Searle and James Lingwood in Conversation
Join us at Pilar Corrias Savile Row for a live conversation between Adrian Searle (Art Critic, The Guardian) and James Lingwood (Director, Artangel) in honour of Julião Sarmento on 28 October 2021, at 5.30pm.
The talk heralds the opening of the exhibition Arena, which will present never-before-seen paintings by Sarmento, who twice represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale.
The iconography and titles of each of the works are loosely based on drawings by Francisco de Goya, seen by Sarmento at the Museo del Prado in 2019. Abstracted from their original context and reimagined on a grand scale, the figures in Sarmento’s paintings offer visions of human life by turns haunting, comic and triumphant, while also disrupting a number of key art historical notions, namely, those of authorship, hermeneutics and the gaze.