Sara Bichão (Lisbon, 1986) lives and works in Lisbon. She completed her undergraduate and master's degrees in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon (2008, 2011). She has participated in various artistic residencies, including Residency Unlimited (2012, USA), PIRA ADM (2016, MX), Artistes en Résidence (2017, FR), and at the Centro de Artes Arquipélago (2018, PT). She has been exhibiting her work since 2009, with notable recent solo exhibitions including "Find Me, I Kill You" (2018) at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; "Coastal" (2017) at Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston; "My Sun Weeps" at the Foundation of Communications, Lisbon; "Somebody’s Address" (2016) and "Open Gates" (2014) at Rooster Gallery, New York; and "Fill" (2014) at Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa, Lisbon.
Her work is represented in various public collections, including the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, MAAT, Lisbon City Council, Fidelidade Mundial, Figueiredo Ribeiro, António Cachola, Norlinda e José Lima, Midfirst Bank Arizona, Benetton Foundation, among others. She has received awards from Fidelidade Mundial – Young Painters (honorable mention, 2009), Anteciparte (selected artist, 2009), and BPI/FBAUL (1st prize in the painting category, 2008).
What is the thing, what is it?
Sara Bichão's work unleashes the meek and the violent that sprouts from the threshold of language. It has the duality of a hackneyed saying, the incompleteness of a riddle, the fluctuation of poetry, the interruption of stuttering. The space it inscribes is as bright and sunny as it is dark and devastating, with no definitive textual framework or closed narrative. “What is the thing, what is it?” that's just it, an unanswered question, which takes us back to childhood, to the philosophical restlessness precociously felt.
(...) “My work is affirmation and doubt” Sara Bichão tells us. Naturally, it would have to be like this: the essential dialectic that exposes and questions central points of contemporary art, and that above all carries forward an experience of the world full of surprises and revelations. As for us, it remains only for us to protect ourselves against the torture of the enigma that her work triggers, calmly and continuously repeating “What is the thing, what is it?”.
Texto por Marta Mestre
Credits
collaboration with Rita Morais partnership with port/ post/ doc
