PEDRO TUDELA IN THE SERRALVES COLLECTION

This exhibition features works by Pedro Tudela (Viseu, 1962) in the Serralves Collection spanning almost thirty years, from 1990 to 2019. Tudela studied Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and began his career in the 1980s. Since then, he has proved to be an eclectic artist working in different disciplines and fields, such as painting, sculpture, performance, sound, multimedia, scenography and experimental electronic music. 

His earliest works, from 1980, were paintings. However, already in the early 1990s, Tudela started to integrate sound in his work, which happened for the first time in the exhibition ‘Mute… life’ (Galeria Atlântica, Porto, 1992), from which a work is featured here. In that exhibition, sound was still autonomous from the visual works, functioning like a soundtrack that enveloped and integrated the various elements in the show. From then on, sound become increasingly relevant as a visual and conceptual part of the work in its own right, on par with drawing, painting or sculpture. Tudela incorporates the various disciplines without hierarchies or boundaries, reflecting the permeability between languages, which becomes one of the main features of his work. Sound becomes the protagonist and is visually treated, often materializing in sculptures which incorporate the very devices that generate it, such as loudspeakers, magnetic tapes, cables, speakers, elements which are at once visual and acoustic.   

Tudela’s artistic practice is inseparable from human existence and the world, which has been manifested through various forms over the course of the years, and is now represented in this exhibition in a selection of nine works.