Porto  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

The 80s: A Topology

Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal

Dominic Eichler One of the curatorial convictions behind the survey exhibition ‘The 80s: A Topology’, was that 1980s art is currently misunderstood and underappreciated. The exhibition, accompanied by an extensive catalogue, presented around 250 works by 70 artists, and was intended as a positive reappraisal of the period. For the most part, the co-curators Ulrich Loocke and Sandra Guimarães stuck fairly squarely to art works originally made in and for gallery and institutional contexts. Without making any impossible claims to completeness, they sought to present an idea of the art of the 1980s at odds with unflattering stereotypes: its rampant commercialism or aesthetic heavy-handedness, for instance. The show also allowed new emphases to emerge in light of contemporary art practice; a practice that has, in many ways, been weaned on a diet of stoic Conceptualism and Minimalist display, but that probably has more in common with 1980s art than is generally acknowledged – particularly in terms of its pluralism and of the culturally and politically neo-conservative climate in which it is made.