On the 15th of May, the Portimão Museum will open the exhibition “We are all colors”, by the German ceramist and sculptor Hein Semke, as part of its 13th anniversary celebrations.
The exhibition, which will run until November 14, «aimed at raising citizens' awareness of the importance of building a more just, egalitarian and intercultural society, through a series of paintings, drawings, monotypes, sculptures and woodcuts of an enormous chromatic diversity, performed by the artist in Portugal, between 1963 and 1976», describes the Câmara de Portimão.
The pieces were selected from a collection of 1672 original works by Hein Semke (1899-1995), «resulting from the exceptional and generous donation by Teresa Balté to the Museum of Portimão».
«The multifaceted, experimental and colorful way of treating the face, body and human figure, especially the female, are the main theme of this new exhibition, curated by José Gameiro, which also reveals the creative spontaneity and capacity of expression, humour, the pleasure of experimenting and challenging that accompanies all of Hein Semke's work», illustrates the municipality.
The Chamber highlights “the sculptor's vision of closed, essential and austere forms, which summarize the human figure in the volume of the torso or center on the head or mask and which, in works on canvas or paper, refuses the illusion of perspective”.
«The artist creates minimal volumes of paint layers by overprinting monotypes, while in woodcuts he recovers the three-dimensionality in the wood carving, sometimes transformed into autonomous reliefs, as in the case of the matrices of the “Parlamento” series», he adds.
For Hein Semke, «art was the path to knowledge of oneself and others, in which we are a unique sum in this universe of multiple colors, as he says in the excerpt of his poem written in 1948; “and in the end, however, however varied the colors, the ring closes in an eternal circle in its unique character”».
The exhibition “We are all colors”, which is part of the Intercultural Week program, which runs from 21 to 29 May, will be available online, on the Portimão Museum website.
Photos: Portimão Chamber
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