Capelo Norte Gallery (Fora de Portas)

entry: General Conditions

Maria José Oliveira

I who once was I

2026-05-15
2026-10-04

Location

Capelo Norte Gallery
Curatorship: Paula Parente Pinto


Working with humble materials and objects marked by use, Maria José Oliveira creates a poetic universe in which memory, experience, and transformation intertwine. Her practice moves across drawing, sculpture, installation, and ritual gesture, exploring the relationships between matter, time, and imagination.

Attentive to processes of metamorphosis and the traces of time, the artist collects, transforms, and reactivates everyday objects through new narratives. Her works evoke ancestral gestures, transmitted knowledge, and sensory experiences, creating spaces where the ordinary and the extraordinary coexist.

Maria José Oliveira (Lisbon, 1943) lives and works in Lisbon. Since the 1970s, she has developed a distinctive artistic practice centred on material experimentation, memory, and the transformation of objects. She has participated in major national and international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1997), and has received several distinctions, among them the Monte Carlo International Contemporary Art Prize. Her work is represented in numerous public and private collections.

On Exhibition

Loops.Expanded 2026

2026-07-14
2026-10-03
Curatorship: Irit Batsry
MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art – Chiado and DuplaCena present, for the 11th consecutive year, an exhibition dedicated to the loop as a seminal form of the moving image.
Temporary Exhibition

On Gestures and Forms

A dialogue between collections

2026-06-18
2026-09-20
Curatorship: MNAA e MNAC
Works from the collections of Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, and Fundação Millennium bcp, engage in a dialogue across different periods, materials, and approaches to artistic creation.
Temporary Exhibition

Alice Geirinhas

Sycorax

2026-05-29
2026-09-20
Curatorship: Lúcia Saldanha e Rui Afonso Santos
Sycorax is an installation of drawings that summons the absent and silenced figure of Sycorax, the witch and mother of Caliban, characters from "The Tempest" by William Shakespeare.
Temporary Exhibition

Ultratremor

Group show

2026-05-29
2026-09-27
Curatorship: Germano Dushá
Between the visible and the invisible, the exhibition brings together artists who explore states of transformation, apparition, and resonance, bringing matter, imagination, and spiritual experience into dialogue.
Temporary Exhibition

Impressões Digitais. MNAC Collection

2024-12-12
2026-12-30
Curatorship: Ana Guimarães, Emília Ferreira, Maria de Aires Silveira e Tiago Beirão Veiga
Consisting of founding works of contemporary Portuguese art historiography, from 1850 to the present day, the MNAC's collection holds several national treasures.
Permanent Exhibition