Featuring works from the Portuguese State Contemporary Art Collection (CACE), the FRESH BREEZE exhibition brings to Germany a selection of exemplary works by a young generation of Portuguese artists, all born in the 1980s and 1990s, whose research and multiple interests find common ground in a plastic and conceptual approach that is both critical and humorous.

On show until 12 January 2024 at the Kunstraum Botschaft, Berlin, the exhibition is curated by critic, art historian, editor and CACE curator Sandra Vieira Jürgens, who creates a playful dialogue between works of different kinds: Fernão Cruz’s burlesque sculpture, Excalibur (safe place) (2018), the negative pregnancy tests in There won’t be any miracles for us (2020-2021), by Isabel Cordovil, the romantic fantasies in Luís Lazaro Matos’s multimedia installation, Tomber Dans Le Lac (2018), and Mariana Gomes’s free and mutant painting, with Untitled (2019) – four names that are emerging as contemporary national talents, both inside and outside the country.

In a game as succinct as it is rich in meaning, the approach of these aesthetic universes proposes an incursion through various human fictions, from individualist exceptionalism to heteronormativity, from heroic destiny to the standardisation of art. The ironic and provocative tone of the pieces, although full of lightness and playfulness, serves as a strategy for revealing the socio-political concerns of this generation, born in the midst of the vigour of a time full of possibilities in Portugal and the world, and which today distrusts the brilliance of that announced future – or even the existence of any future at all.

The result of a partnership between the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage and the Portuguese Embassy in Berlin, this pioneering initiative is part of the international circulation programme of the Portuguese State Contemporary Art Collection, which aims to project and internationalise Portuguese artists. This year, in collaboration with various national and foreign entities, CACE has also held the exhibition DARK SAFARI, presented between February and July at the Museum and Cultural Centre of Foz Côa; NON FINITO, at the Castelo Branco Contemporary Culture Centre, during the months of June, July and September; and, most recently, at the Official Residence of the Portuguese Ambassador to Spain, Madrid, Una Casa, Teatro del Mundo. The next exhibition to open in Portugal will be in Beja in March 2024. Soon after, Aveiro, Elvas, Tavira and Leiria will host exhibitions of new acquisitions from the Collection – which in 2023 alone added 50 works by 35 artists.