The Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris presents in its walls from January 2016 Julião Sarmento, one of the greatest contemporary Portuguese artists.

The exhibition will reveal recent works but also some historical works in a constricted but emblematic device of his approach, sophisticated wish, which explores the notions of desire and representation through cinematographic framing, references related to the history of art, to literature and through the contemporary. There is a constant voyeuristic pleasure from a fluctuating vision. The thing, even, is this margin of eroticism declined throughout this rich and abundant work, it is this body of woman, which goes beyond the object of desire and reveals itself as a subject that can arouse or defuse this one.

A catalog was published on this occasion.

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About the artist

Born in Lisbon in 1948, Julião Sarmento has been developing since the 1970s a practice associating painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation. The artist has to his credit more than a hundred exhibitions around the world. In 1997 Julião Sarmento represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale. More recently, we have seen his work at the Tate Modern in London, at the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo in Malaga, Spain (2010) at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati (2011). The Fundação Serralves in Porto has dedicated a major retrospective to the artist in autumn 2012, and recently to Mamac in Nice (2014).

Julião Sarmento's work is represented in the largest public collections - notably at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), at Tate London, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at the National Museum of Modern Art / Center Pompidou in Paris, at Moderna Museet in Stockholm etc.