In 2018 we became zet gallery. This was the missing change to the project in which the visual arts are thought and promoted in the context of dstgroup’s cultural backbone.
Last year there were six exhibitions in a path which began with the photography of André Castanho Correia (b.1988), Gabriel Tizón (b.1973), Dimitri Mellos (b.1970), Ricardo Reis (b.1981), Miguel De (b.1992) and limamil (b.1973). BE A PHOTOGRAPHER was a sort of punch in the stomach and the first clash in the walls we wanted to destroy. With Joana de Carvalho e Silva (b.1988) the paintwork was cinema, illusion, visible and invisible, poetry of imagined sites. We crossed. Never again would we stop crossing artistic subjects and thinking areas and with Paulo Neves’s sculptures (b. 1959), we also crossed the town with an ambitious exhibition which went over the walls of zet gallery and inhabited Nogueira da Silva Museum and Congregados Basilica. We created circuits. Miguel Neves Oliveira (b.1980), Ana Almeida Pinto (b.1982), João Carqueijeiro (b.1954) and Grupo em Construção (Group under Construction), Pedro Figueiredo (b.1974), Juan Coruxo (b.1961), Luís Canário Rocha (b.1986) and Raúl Ferreira (b.1975) joined Braga’s Book Fair and in 7 CASE-BY-CASE POETRY FORMS, they idealized the artistic object stemming from poets and words. In September we slowed down our pace by showing the paintwork of Maria João Oliveira (b.1946), André Lemos Pinto (b.1976), Fátima Santos (b.1983), Alexandre Coxo (b.1987) and Sofia Leitão & Henry Nestitt (b.1971 & b.1969), and then we moved faster with the 19 protagonists of SINGULAR PACE, an exhibition with which we start 2019 that gathers propositions by young artists connected to the Fine Arts Faculty of Lisbon.
We also took Cris D.K. (b.1978), Pedro Santos Silva (b.1980), R. Gritto (b.1976), Raquel Felgueiras (b.1982), André Castanho Correia (b.1988), Florisa Novo Rodrigues (b.1991), Lauren Maganete (b.1970) and Elizabeth Leite (b.1982) on a trip of showrooms at our partners’ sites. The articles written by Helena Mendes Pereira in the magazine RUA, and the ones written by Catarina Martins in Onde Ir, and the videos of artists which Vanessa Ribeiro showed the world through social networks are examples of how we highlighted so many other artists.
In 2018 the public space welcomed us: firstly, by answering to a challenge proposed by Braga’s Municipality, which consisted of idealizing a wall painting for the skatepark of the renovated Road Sports Park. Ricardo Pistola (b.1980) was the one in charge of our response and the drawing made by all the people who glided on that background and the extension of their body movements intensifies the pure poetry of colors and the geometric illusion created by the artist.
In October four artists were challenged to create artworks with and for the city, starting from industrial, construction and demolition waste. Ana Almeida Pinto (b.1982), Hernâni Reis Baptista (b.1986), Miguel Neves Oliveira (b.1980) and Rute Rosas (b.1972) dared to make our quest even wider: the ART&SUSTAINABILITY Symposium. This was a dstgroup project that zet gallery built along with Braga’s Municipality and the Institute of Science and Innovation for Bio-Sustainability (IB-S) of the University of Minho. The artworks became larger and went under complex processes of production which involved dstgroup’s companies and collaborators. We took the concept to some local teaching establishments, including the Prison Establishment of Braga: the sense of accomplishment is enormous after understanding the dimension of the work which Luís Canário Rocha (b.1986) and Ricardo de Campos (b.1977) undertook in the pedagogical tutorials that occurred during this Symposium. The necessary public debate, inserted in this program, preceded the opening of the town’s new artworks: the Bridge Park gained ‘From Time, in Space, a bridge, a plea. With or without you.’ by Rute Rosas; Bretas Roundabout, the ‘Open Windows’ by Miguel Neves Oliveira. dstgroup’s industrial and business park welcomed Ana Almeida Pinto and Hernâni Reis Baptista, who joined a legacy of over 800 pieces of which zet gallery did the inventory in 2018.
In these two weeks, Braga became the only Portuguese town with a work of Julian Opie (b.1958), currently one of Britain’s most prestigious artists. At the fast pace of Teresa, implemented in Altice Forum Braga’s outer space, we rush to seize 2019.
Five years after our first day, zet gallery will sail through uncharted territory to leave its mark in the unique universe of contemporary Art, always looking into the future.
