The exhibition «Tragedy and Farce: Júlio Pomar and Gabriel Abrantes» curated by Sara Antónia Matos, is part of an annual programme organised by the Atelier-Museu that brings together the work of Júlio Pomar and other artists. The aim of this juxtaposition is to establish new relationships between the painter’s work and the contemporary world by exploring whether the concepts and issues raised by him remain relevant today. Gabriel Abrantes seeks to examine some of these issues, such as the importance of painting today, its critical and political potential, and the various exhibition formats. Consequently, the exhibition has been conceived as a specific intervention within the Atelier-Museum space from its inception, and this year it forms part of the celebrations marking the centenary of Júlio Pomar.
In response to a core group of Pomar’s neo-realist works, comprising O Almoço do Trolha [The Bricklayer’s Lunch] (1946-50), Resistência [Resistance] (1946), Estrada Nova [New Road] (1946) Marcha [March] (1946) e Sem título (Rapaz) [Untitled (Boy)] (1942?), Abrantes presents paintings and drawings that reflect on the themes of censorship, oppression, violence, resistance, and precariousness in the 2026 context.
Drawing on his usual working process, which uses digital and computational tools to create 3D scenes and figures that are then realised in traditional painting techniques such as oil on linen, drawing and pastels, Abrantes draws parallels with Pomar. These parallels are evident not only in the artistic media of painting and drawing, but also in the social criticism conveyed by the themes and subjects of the paintings.
Although Gabriel Abrantes focused on a particular period of Júlio Pomar’s work, he was also interested in how these pieces were originally displayed. Using photographic records from the time, Abrantes examined and highlighted the qualities of traditional scenographic approaches to presenting art, museographic practices that are now of great importance for appreciating and recognising art.
The installation on the ground floor, designed by Gabriel Abrantes, evokes and reinterprets the 1947 exhibition hall of the SNBA (Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes), based on Mário Novais’s photographs of the «II General Exhibition of Fine Arts». These photographs are key to understanding the exhibition and are reproduced here. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has made Mário Novais’s photographic records available, and they illustrate the museographic qualities underlying this type of exhibition, which was staged very differently to how we see exhibitions in galleries or museums today.