Pere Portabella

Born, 1927 in Figueras, Spain

From the archived Documenta 11 website : www.documenta12.de//archiv/d11/data/english/index.html

“Pere Portabella has held an important place in Spanish cinema for over four decades. His work must be conceived of as the powerful result of a cross between artistic avant-garde, filmic practice, and political activity, and is founded on two central themes: synchrony with the languages of contemporary avant-garde and their practices of rupture and profundity in tackling a deeply-rooted practice that seeks to influence the cultural, political, and historical conditions of its time. ‘Breaking with the Aristotelian narrative canon, rejecting the anecdote, going straight to the point’, undermining the mechanisms of visuality and naturalism, and contradicting the bourgeois lifestyle and its alienated forms of social identity are a few of the aspects that characterize this cinema, so strongly anti-idealistic and peculiarly materialistic in its images. Over time it takes us back to history, via a return to the cinema with Puente de Varsovia (Warsaw Bridge, 1989), a just and vigorous film by a tenacious filmmaker who withstands forgetting and nostalgia.”

»  Documenta 11- Frieze Review 1

Review relating to an exhibition, 2002

»  Documenta 11- Frieze Review 2

Review relating to an exhibition, 2002

»  Documenta 11_Platform 5 : Exhibition / Catalogue

Catalogue relating to an exhibition, 2002

»  Documenta 11_Platform 5 : Exhibition / Short Guide

Catalogue relating to an exhibition, 2002

»  In the heart of the black box

Article relating to an exhibition, 2002

»  The show that maps out art’s future

Review relating to an exhibition, 2002