‘Paintings by António Sena’: works from the EDP Foundation Art Collection at ARCOlisboa 2025

As a patron of the ARCOlisboa international art fair since 2017, EDP Foundation is reinforcing its policy of cultural patronage by supporting the organisation of this event, and through its acquisitions of works by Portuguese artists in the context of the fair over the years, thus supporting national artists and galleries. ARCOlisboa 2025 will take place in Cordoaria Nacional, Lisbon, from 29 May to 1 June.

For the 2025 edition, and for the third year running, EDP Foundation is presenting an exhibition of works from its Art Collection in this privileged space. ‘Paintings by António Sena,’ curated by MAAT’s director João Pinharanda, pays tribute to one of Portugal’s most remarkable artists, who passed away in 2024, bringing together a number of paintings created between 1972 and 2011. In this exhibition, the artist, who was awarded the 2002 EDP Foundation Painting Prize, reveals all the ambiguity of the boundaries between writing and drawing.

This collection forms part of the more than 2500 works by more than 300 artists that make up the EDP Foundation Art Collection, which began in 2000 with the aim of covering the various generations of Portuguese artists from the 1960s onwards and including the various disciplines of artistic creation right up to the present day. Over the course of 25 years, the Collection has been enriched in close conjunction with EDP Foundation's cultural activities, and has been a regular feature in the MAAT programme, as well as in various other national and international exhibitions.

The chromatic scarcity, the presence of raw canvas, the almost illegible handwritten texts, and the graphic forms that hover between writing and numbers — everything in his work suggests reflection on the boundaries of language and the expressive power of gesture. ‘António Sena had the hand of a draughtsman, creating a permanent tension between the rules imposed by language and spelling, and the desire for liberation from those rules; it questions the structure of meaning, showing us the path to the meaningful freedom of images.’ João Pinharanda.

Read the curator’s full text here.