Root Man celebrates forty years of Agostinho Santos’s artistic career and symbolically returns to Bicho Homem (Man Animal), the title of his first solo exhibition, held in 1987. Not to repeat that point of origin, but to delve deeper into it. Between one title and the other unfolds a journey shaped by metamorphoses, where memory, experience and thought intersect with matter, gesture and instinct.
Curated by Rita Roque, the exhibition brings together different moments, themes and series from a body of work deeply connected to the artist’s experience and to the issues of his time. Violence, war, inequality, refugees, social exclusion, the condition of people experiencing homelessness, power relations and human fragility run through a practice in which stone, bronze, clay, plastic, paper, paint and various objects coexist without hierarchy. Making, the hand and the transformation of matter occupy a central place in the artistic process.
At the Central Centre of the Museum of Porto, in the Alfândega building, Root Man expands into the exhibition space itself. A temporary studio brings the creative process closer to the visitor, while an installation of eight hammock beds, painted by the artist during the installation process, introduces a direct relationship with the body and extends the social concerns that run through his work. The different roots of forty years of artistic creation thus converge in the same territory, between what one comes from and the forms that remain to be discovered.
+inf EXPOSIÇÃO HOMEM RAIZ, DE AGOSTINHO SANTOS - Museu da Cidade Porto