Lisbon, Feb. 21, 2025 (Lusa) - One of the world's leading private collections of Chinese ceramics is to go on show in Sintra, near Lisbon, on Saturday, when the Albuquerque Foundation will open its doors to the public to present a selection of its 2,600 pieces and also to promote contemporary artists through residencies and temporary exhibitions, according to officials from the foundation.
Conceived by Brazilian collector Renato de Albuquerque and his granddaughter and co-founder, Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho, the Sintra premises is to be the permanent home of the Albuquerque Collection of Chinese Ceramics, as well hosting a programme of temporary exhibitions dedicated to contemporary ceramics under the guidance of its director, Italian critic and curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti.
"With a collection as important as this, we don't have the right to keep it private," Teixeira de Carvalho, who chairs the foundation's board of directors, told Lusa, adding that she felt a “civic obligation” to make it “available to the public so that it can be appreciated and studied.”
The public opening on Saturday will feature the 'Connections' exhibition, with works from the collection of Chinese porcelain pieces made for export, and a solo show by US artist Theaster Gates, whose artistic practice encompasses urban planning, sculptural ceramics and performance.
There are also plans for what Teixeira de Carvalho described as a "very ambitious" programme of residencies for artists and researchers, and an educational programme for the local and international community. She added that there is already a partnership with Sintra's state schools, with guided tours, as well as a schedule of lectures and symposiums.
"The pieces of ancient Chinese ceramics were accumulated by a person who did it out of passion, with no end goal of creating a collection, but which ended up forming," she explained. "There comes a time when it becomes bigger than the collector himself and than a single family."
From the 1980s onwards, Renato Albuquerque - whose career was dedicated to engineering and urban planning - expanded his activities in Portugal, with projects including the Quinta da Beloura and Quinta Patino, both in the Sintra-Cascais area, among others.
The foundation was set up in a property in Rua António dos Reis, in Sintra, long owned by the family.
"It's an estate like many others in that area, where my sister and I used to spend our holidays when my grandfather started doing business in Portugal," Teixeira de Carvalho recalled of the house, which retains its original façade but whose interior has been remodelled on contemporary architectural lines.
Consisting of more than 2,600 pieces gathered over 60 years by Renato de Albuquerque, the Albuquerque Collection of Chinese Ceramics is described by the Albuquerque Foundation as "one of the world's most important and prestigious private collections of Chinese porcelain from the Ming and Qing dynasties, both imperial and export, some of whose pieces have been loaned to internationally renowned institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among others."
Now being put on display to the public for the first time, the collection includes both export and imperial Chinese porcelain, including rare "first editions" - so called because they were the initial orders for Chinese porcelain placed by the Portuguese fro mthe 16th century, some bearing European iconography.
"The main focus of the collection is from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, but there are works dating back to the twentieth century BC," said Teixeira de Carvalho, stressing that the show “aims to celebrate the cultural and commercial links between East and West, in which Portugal plays a key role.”
As well as showcasing the collection, the long-running exhibitions will emphasise the global impact of Chinese porcelain through curatorial approaches that will aim to "deepen the public's knowledge of Chinese ceramics and their historical importance.
"We're going to preserve and display the collection, but it will go much further than that," she said. "The core of the project is to pay homage to ceramics and this will give us an identity, through a cultural programme of contemporary ceramics exhibitions."
There are to be three to four of these a year, involving various artists, from traditional ceramists to visual artists, both young and established.
Teixeira de Carvalho, a former human rights lawyer in Brazil and internationally, entered the art world in 2009. She has been the director of several commercial galleries in this area, including Luisa Strina, Hauser & Wirth and Michael Werner.
The new foundation - which is open to the public for visits from Tuesday to Sunday, between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. - also has a pavilion dedicated to temporary exhibitions, a specialised library, a restaurant serving local, sustainable cuisine, a shop and a garden to which entry is free.
"We're at a time when ceramics are playing a major role in the contemporary art world, with a reinterpretation of what handicrafts are and what fine arts are," said Teixeira de Carvalho. "It's not our role to determine whether ceramics is one thing or another, but we do want to raise this medium to the level it deserves, and emphasise that until now these artists were overlooked for making handicrafts."
A civil engineer and architect with over 70 years' experience in construction and urban planning, Renato de Albuquerque co-founded Albuquerque & Takaoka, one of the largest construction companies in Brazil, active from 1951 to 1994. He oversaw the development of the Alphaville concept, which introduced sustainable urbanism to Brazil in the 1970s, recalls a text released by the foundation.
Renato Albuquerque is to be honoured on Friday afternoon by Portugal's president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in a ceremony at the Belém Palace in Lisbon, with the Order of Infante Dom Henrique, Teixeira de Carvalho reported.
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