Pancho Guedes - na Suíça

Depois de Maputo ,

PANCHO GUEDES, An alternative Modernist
Museu Suíço de Arquitectura SAM Basileia - 30.09.07 – 20.01.08

Curated by Pedro Gadanho * (Ver abaixo comentário de Pedro Gadanho)

INVITATION TO THE EXHIBITION OPENING ON SATURDAY, 29. SEPTEMBER 2007, AT 7 PM,
S AM SWISS ARCHITECTURE MUSEUM, BASEL

On the occasion of the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union, his Excellency the Ambassador of Portugal to Switzerland and the Swiss Architecture Museum cordially invite you to the opening.

The first major exhibition on the Portuguese architect Pancho Guedes focusses on 25 years of his life and work in Mozambique from the 1950s onwards. Pancho Guedes incorporated the richness of African culture and developed a prolific range of styles, confounding  conventional preconceptions on the nature of architectural production. Combining the experimental freedom of the artist with the
creative wealth of the specialist, he is an architect who realises that at the heart of the true modernist lies an enduring openness to a myriad of cultural influences.

S AM No. 3: the accompanying publication, pulished by Christoph Merian Verlag
will be presented on the occasion of the opening.

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"I claim for architects the rights and liberties that painters and poets have held for so long" - Pancho Guedes

S AM will be host to the first major exhibition on Pancho Guedes, the portuguese Architect and eclectic modernist. The exhibition will open In September 2007 in conjunction with  - and as a response to - the large scaleretrospective on Corbusier at the vitra design museum.

Living and working for most of his life in Mozambique, Pancho Guedes absorbed the influences of African culture and developed an extraordinary range of styles in a manner that confounds conventional preconceptions on the nature of architectural production.
His wide range of styles and his painting, sculpture, and built works meld into a world that combines the experimental freedom of the amateur, with the creative wealth of the specialist;  an architect who realised  that at the heart of the true modernist lies an enduring openness to a myriad of cultural influences.

"With work drawn from Pancho Guedes' previously unpublished archives, the exhibition can reveal the prolific output of an architect who, working in one of the most cosmopolitan contexts in Africa in the 1950s, anticipated various trends and ways of thinking that are still to be found today in the international context." - Pedro Gadanho

O Leão que ri, LM 1955-56

E VIRÁ A LISBOA??? * Ver comentários

Press release do SAM:

"A quarter of a century after he has been shown at the ArchitecturalAssociation, in London, Pancho Guedes is now revisited at the SAM, Swiss Architecture Museum, in what can be regarded as the first critical and curatorial approach to the eccentric oeuvre that this architect realised in Africa during the Fifties and Sixties.
Coinciding with the presentation of a major retrospective of Le Corbusierat the nearby Vitra Museum, this new show will provide visitors with a portrayal of an architect who, as Corbusier, also transformed his deep involvement with the visual and plastic arts into a powerful drive for architectural imagination. This legendary Mozambican architect – who built an outstanding reputation within the most inner circles of the early sixties architectural milieu – offers today the historical perspective of an alternative modernity in which the rationale of the International Style is first contrasted with a truly multicultural vision. Contrary to most colonial architecture,Pancho’s work is justly referential because of his active engagement with local cultural contexts and references, while still producing unique and appealing architectural images and forms. Against the hegemony of the single modernist manner, Pancho Guedes is one of the first architects to playfully introduce a plethora of styles that respond to different cultural circumstances, various types of clients and even the most adverse economic conditions.

A lover and collector of African artistic and cultural artefacts, he was also a pioneer in experimenting with cross-cultural and symbolical references without ever missing the creative and logical edge of the modern architect. Drawn in close collaboration with the architect – now aged 82 – and drawing from his vast unpublished archive, the current exhibition will provide the visitors with five perspectives on the work of Pancho Guedes, which range from the development of some of his most personal organic styles – true ante-visions of the Pop architecture of the Sixties –, to his contributions towards the construction of the modern city, and down to his experimentations with the scarce resources of so-called bush architecture.
The show will thus reveal previously unreleased material for projects suchas the Smiling Lion, the Saipal Bakery, or the Airplane House – works of architecture which, although built in a rather remote location, werecertainly ahead of their time both for their symbolic sculptural qualities, and also for their use of organic geometry, unexpected materials, local forms of ornament, or even rare and bold spatial solutions.

Also part of the exhibition are the architect’s sculptures, paintings,murals and, most importantly, a selection of his extensive collection of sketches that show his vivid imagination at work, either in visions of arare space-age African architecture or of an almost surrealistic and naif portrayal of local cultural realities. A recent artist’s film or interviews with Pancho Guedes and hiscontemporaries also help to recreate and evoke a specific context that reveals the stern contrasts of the African metropolis now and then. (Pedro Gadanho, Curator, June 2007)

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Informação da OA

Um quarto de século depois da última exposição sobre Pancho Guedes (na Architecural Association, em Londres]  o S AM (Museu de Arquitectura da Suiça) acolhe a vida e obra de Pancho Guedes, em diálogo com a mostra de Le Corbusier que inaugura no mesmo dia no Vitra Museum, na cidade vizinha de Weil am Rhein.

«(...) Como quase sempre, por detrás desta realização existem várias histórias.
Não se trata só da longa história de um arquitecto de origem portuguesa que, depois de crescer em Moçambique e cursar arquitectura na África do Sul, iniciou a sua excêntrica carreira na cosmopolita Lourenço Marques dos anos 50.
Trata-se também de uma história de redescoberta de atitudes e valores arquitectónicos que a história, com frequência, insiste em esquecer ou obliterar.

A ideia da actual exposição nasce, assim, após o encontro com um arquitecto e editor italiano que, após alguns minutos de conversa sobre o cenário arquitectónico português num almoço do Archilab em 2002, me pergunta se eu gostaria de escrever um livro sobre o “anti-Siza.”
Percebendo que me testava, disparei: “Sobre o Pancho Guedes?”
(...) Percebi então que o fascínio pela obra de Pancho Guedes ultrapassava fronteiras e sugeria uma face obscura – e, no entanto, extraordinariamente luminosa – da arquitectura portuguesa do século XX. Achei, então, que fazer uma exposição seria um bom preâmbulo para chegar a escrever um livro sobre esta história.(...)»

A exposição sobre o arquitecto, escultor, pintor e professor, nascido em 1925, é comissariada por Pedro Gadanho (que assina o texto de onde se retiraram os extractos acima, publicado na revista DIF).

A exposição é apoiada pelo Instituto Camões, pela Ordem dos Arquitectos, pela FLAD, pela Fundação Gulbenkian, pela Direcção-Geral das Artes e conta, entre outros, com o patrocínio da Viroc.
S AM - Schweizerisches Architekturmuseum
Steinenberg 7, Basileia, Suiça

E VIRÁ A LISBOA???

mais informação:

Guedes info (por Cedric Green, born in Mozambique and qualified as an architect in 1960 at Natal University)
This website is intended to provide information about his extraordinary architecture and other work, and to begin a growing archive about him. The material here is basically structured around an issue of the magazine  "Arquitectura Portuguesa" of July 1985 featuring his work, which he wittily entitled "Vitruvius Mozambicanus" divided into 25 'books'. There are sections which follow on his drawings, sculpture, paintings, individual buildings, and a page of links.
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AMÂNCIO D’ALPOIM (PANCHO) GUEDES a biographical essay - Cedric Green
published in "LISBOSCOPIO" the catalogue of the official Portuguese representation at the 10th International Architecture Exhibition - 2006 Venice Biennale. Junho 2006

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Galeria Perve , Lisboa - Antológica | 1945 - 2005 | Pintura,  Desenho e Escultura

NOTA no Expresso/Actual de 28-05-2005:

Amâncio Guedes , Perve Galeria  
Arquitecto com uma longa e reconhecida obra que se desenvolveu principalmente em Moçambique e na África do Sul, também professor e interveniente nos grandes debates dos anos 50 sobre a arquitectura moderna (CIAM X, Team Ten, etc.), Amâncio d’Alpoim Miranda (Pancho) Guedes, que acaba de fazer 80 anos, é igualmente autor de uma original obra de pintura e escultura, que se integra mais na lógica de uma criação total marcada por um espírito exuberante, irreverente, eclético e visionário do que nos respectivos cânones disciplinares.
 A mostra «Viva Pancho» é uma antologia extensa mas parcial, com início cronológico num quadro de 1948 e prolongada até ao presente, por vezes com peças de dupla datação (por exemplo, 1958-2005), incluindo obras de pintura, desenho e escultura que se relacionam em muitos casos com as suas invenções arquitectónicas (as «arquitecturas pintadas», a extraordinária Casa de Bonecas da Catarina, de 1967), e que noutros ensaiam o projecto de uma «pintura luso-moçambicana» de inspiração popular e ingénua, ou podem ser comentários de situações políticas ou autobiográficas e, em geral, dão conta da imaginação livre e do humor de Pancho Guedes e seus heterónimos.
Em especial, destacam-se as esculturas de madeira, incluindo comboios de parede, O Castelo do Corsário e as «Caravelas, gôndolas e ‘sheboats’», segundo a designação usada pelo autor numa anterior exposição que teve lugar na Gal. Cómicos, hoje Gal. Luís Serpa («Da Invenção dos Templos e Outras Artes»), em 1987. E fica a aguardar-se uma abordagem retrospectiva da obra do arquitecto e do artista. (Até 11 Jun.) A.P.

Comments

[Pedro Gadanho]

Para responder à pergunta colocada: não, a não ser por súbito milagre, a exposição não virá a Portugal. Goraram-se as negociações com o CCB - que corriam desde 2002 e pelas mais óbvias razões - e gorou-se também o protocolo com Serralves - com quem ocorreram conversações durante um ano - por falta de resposta recorrente da instituição.

[ap]

Este país é de facto miserável. Desbaratam-se todos os trunfos.
E a nova CML, o Pavilhão de Portugal, o Manuel Salgado, o Manuel Vicente, etc...?

[Isabel Barros]

Ah, afinal sempre veio a Lisboa! E em grande!
Pancho é uma pessoa fantástica e a exibição em Lisboa estava espectacular.
Eu fui aluna do Pancho em 1995 e por um mero acaso encontrei-me com ele ao visitar a exposição.
No meu blog está o resto da história http://isabelbarros.blogs.ie/2009/09/01/my-unexpected-encounter-with-professor-pancho-guedes/
Isabel Barros