Vera Cortes Art Agency

Much has been written about museum and art gallery spaces and the different architectural strategies for art exhibiting. Our understanding is that art exhibition spaces need not be abstract or deprived of character, but they should increasingly allow a certain degree of flexibility.

Vera Cortês is a young and experimental gallery working with artists in a wide range of media, from installation and sculpture, to drawing, painting, photography, video and performance. As with other galleries, this wideness of media has increasingly lead artists to display their works in reconfigured “spatial capsules”, wherefore the ‘officially designed’ exhibition space becomes relatively irrelevant.

The gallery is located is a lofty and elegant 1st-floor apartment, in a 19th- century building, on the Lisbon riverfront, in a neighbourhood also known as the Design District, on account of its concentration of designer shops, art galleries, architects and design studios. The original space and finishings of this bourgeois’ apartment had been severely damaged by its use as offices, namely in the parquet flooring, artistic stucco ceilings and framework. Nonetheless, its structural partition system remained largely unchanged and it was possible, with a very low budget, to reinstate the magnificence of the place, mostly by removing the suspended ceilings, reconstructing stuccowork, and installing a simple lighting system of electronically controlled fluorescent tubes. The result is a whitewashed, light and friendly space that, while allowing considerable transformations, nonetheless retains its original residential character.