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Now Reading: Chiado’s Parish Art Collection Invites Its First Outside Artist
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Chiado’s Parish Art Collection Invites Its First Outside Artist
Chiado’s Parish Art Collection Invites Its First Outside Artist
A branch pushes through what might be mineral crust or a cast surface left to weather for years. In Paulo Canilhas’s new work, dense, stratified forms sit between sculpture and sediment—erosion and intention indistinguishable, the found object and the constructed form one and the same.
These pieces anchor Das pedras que crescemos (“From the Stones We Grow”), the fourth exhibition at the Acervo Santa Maria Maior and the first to hand the Chiado parish’s collection to an outside artist. He was not asked to curate but to set new work beside the holdings and let the friction speak. The show opens 2 July at Rua Serpa Pinto 2B, steps from the national contemporary art museum, and runs to 29 August, Monday to Saturday, 14:00–20:00. Admission is free.
The Acervo is barely seven months old, inaugurated in December 2025, but it rests on a decade of quiet accumulation. Since 2017 every artist exhibiting at the Galeria Santa Maria Maior, a small space in the parish council’s lobby, has donated one work. More than forty shows later, the collection sustains a programme of its own.
Canilhas, born in Almada in 1969 and trained at AR.CO, has spent nearly a decade in mineral matter: from As pedras do caminho que faço (“The Stones Along My Path”, 2017) through A arquitectura de uma flor (“The Architecture of a Flower”) to forms where vegetation no longer pushes against architecture but grows from within the stone itself.
For the installation he selected a photograph by Orlando Azevedo from the Acervo’s reserves. Azevedo, born on Terceira in the Azores in 1949, exhibited his Ruínas series at the parish gallery, almost certainly how the image entered the collection. Between Canilhas’s mineral bodies and Azevedo’s documented ruins, the show stages a conversation about what lasts and what shifts, without insisting on an answer.
Limestone, basalt, calçada: Lisbon has always built from what lay underfoot. At Rua Serpa Pinto 2B, a collection assembled one donated work at a time now poses the question its newest artist puts in the title: we do not merely build from stone. We grow from it.
