Materials Lab, 2015–2023
“First of all, artists should break rules. When I did my first Materials Lab in 2015 I was not thinking about documenting my work. I was thinking about how to talk about my work while not using images of the works themselves. Rather, I was showing the whole process of making the artwork: from ideas to research materials to construction materials. But, after all, the decision was mine. What to include, what to add, what to leave behind? I was wondering how to organise several boxes, each box referring to a specific piece containing archival objects and discarded materials of different origin that belonged to processes of research: silk threads, books, book segments, exhibition catalogues, models, text fragments, magazine pages, inkjet prints, notes, drawings, marble, steel, bricks, dirt, dust, among others. I was literally unpacking my artworks not knowing that I was creating another artwork.”
In Conversation With Fernanda Fragateiro On The Problem Of The Documentation Of The Contemporary Artwork, by Claudio Zecchi
“First of all, artists should break rules. When I did my first Materials Lab in 2015 I was not thinking about documenting my work. I was thinking about how to talk about my work while not using images of the works themselves. Rather, I was showing the whole process of making the artwork: from ideas to research materials to construction materials. But, after all, the decision was mine. What to include, what to add, what to leave behind? I was wondering how to organise several boxes, each box referring to a specific piece containing archival objects and discarded materials of different origin that belonged to processes of research: silk threads, books, book segments, exhibition catalogues, models, text fragments, magazine pages, inkjet prints, notes, drawings, marble, steel, bricks, dirt, dust, among others. I was literally unpacking my artworks not knowing that I was creating another artwork.”
In Conversation With Fernanda Fragateiro On The Problem Of The Documentation Of The Contemporary Artwork, by Claudio Zecchi
title, added 2021 for the {title} work
“[…] as a lexicon of the artist's references, helping us to understand her generically entitled Materials lab emerges, as a lexicon of the artist's references, helping us to understand her
connections to specific places, political struggles and the poetics of social transformation.”
“Materials Lab is composed of a wide variety of research materials from the artist’s projects over seven years. Within each box there are materials that relate to specific projects and reveal histories of individuals like Otti Berger or Lygia Clark. However, the artist is not presenting these materials as a ‘code to crack’ in order to reveal previous works or merely an exposé of a working process. Fragateiro presents a new kind of map that provides insight into her working processes and the worlds she explores. Materials Lab is a cartographic process that enables the artist and the viewer to see new connections, in time, space and history.”
![Materials Lab, 2020]()
“Materials Lab is composed of a wide variety of research materials from the artist’s projects over seven years. Within each box there are materials that relate to specific projects and reveal histories of individuals like Otti Berger or Lygia Clark. However, the artist is not presenting these materials as a ‘code to crack’ in order to reveal previous works or merely an exposé of a working process. Fragateiro presents a new kind of map that provides insight into her working processes and the worlds she explores. Materials Lab is a cartographic process that enables the artist and the viewer to see new connections, in time, space and history.”
em construção / under construction
Site-specific installation, Campus DST, Braga, 2025
em construção / under construction, 2025
Pigmented precast concrete, galvanised steel and mass vegetation / 16 x 11 x 10 m approx. cm
em construção / under construction creates a space between construction and demolition. It is characterized by a tension between abstract and concrete and takes as its starting point an obsolete concrete construction, whose reuse is a way of dealing with the remnants of what was left unbuilt.
Fernanda Fragateiro began with a process of abstraction of planes and surfaces that are fixed to a metal structure, used as a grid, where a complex interaction of vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines develops. This structure is the place for the deconstruction of a wall that appears fragmented in space, like a ruin under construction, in a process that is the reverse of disappearance. A set of concrete panels, collapsing onto metal beams, reveals rhythms and visual relationships that remind us of the ruins of buildings and cities, whose traces of a lost past surround and shape us.
The sculpture is definitely constructed as a ruin and establishes a process of deconstruction, but it is intended as a place for the flourishing of new forms and new ways of life, in a deliberate strategy to compensate for the catastrophe. Although it conveys an image of instability and collapse, this work exists under the sign of lightness.
All construction is the beginning of ruin. All memory is ruin. The construction of ruins or building upon ruins acts as a backdrop for work
and power, where the past fertilises the present.
The sculpture, in its permanent and fixed state, acts as an anchor in the forest area of Campus DST. Around it, the terrain is shaped, a meadow is planted and a subtle amphitheatre is installed as a place to linger and contemplate. In contrast to the permanence of the sculpture, the surrounding space is all impermanence and change, open to being contaminated by the passage of time and by use.
Photos: ArtWorks – Audiovisual Team
Abrir janelas à pedrada / Opening windows with stones
Site-specific installation, Serralves Museum, Porto, 2025
Curated by Inês Grosso
Abrir janelas à pedrada / Opening windows with stones, 2025
Lacquered steel, aerated concrete, stucco, pigment / 331,5 x 180 x 45 cm
Opening windows with stones forms part of the cycle of works commissioned for the bridge that connects the main building of the Serralves Museum to the Álvaro Siza Wing, opened in October 2023. Fragateiro presents a wall of light cement blocks that radically transforms our perception of the space.
Suspended from the inside of the bridge, this irregular and asymmetrical wall appears as a foreign body in the architectural order of the place, establishing a tension between weight and suspension, density and permeability. Built from fragments of buildings demolished in the centre of Lisbon, which the artist had been collecting over several years, the wall stands as a critique of the transformations recently taking place in the city where she lives and works. Fragateiro tells us the story of an urban space subordinated to the demands of a financial logic that is unrelated to the needs of its inhabitants, where each demolition adds a new layer of absence to the palimpsest of the city, leaving marks that highlight the fragility of collective memory and the silent violence of this radical redesign of our cities.
In the long corridor, Opening windows with stones stands as an obstacle: a physical barrier that also carries a symbolic meaning. Without any apparent connection between them, the blocks seem about to crumble, but they mutually support one another, leaving cracks through which the light can pass and our eyes can see. When viewed up close, each stone shows signs of its origin – pieces of plaster, cement, mortar, brick, chipped patches – all testifying to the ongoing process of destruction. The artist does not attempt to reconstruct what has been lost; instead, she organises the fragments into a body which preserves the marks of the destruction that has taken place and shows us the contradictions of the present, questioning how the city manages its own memory. The installation thus functions as a form of archaeological criticism, in which our understanding of the precariousness of the whole is not limited to its formal dimension, causing us instead to reflect on everything that is lost with the disappearance of buildings, be they historical or self-built – the material, but also the stories, the collective practices and the ways of life that are erased by contemporary developments, all undertaken in the name of progress.
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Inês Grosso
Photos: Filipe Braga
Boa viagem, muitas maravilhas
Group exhibition, Atelier – Museu Júlio Pomar, Lisbon, 2025
Curated by Lígia Afonso, Marta Guerreiro and Rita Salgueiro
Artista Ausente / Absent Artist, 2025
Vinyl acrylic paint, wood, cast brass / 2,80 x 11,20 m
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Mural after Eduardo Nery’s study for the tile panel located on Avenida Infante Santo (Lisboa, 2000) and unfinished sculptures of Marília Torres (d. 1985), found at the artist’s studio in 2024.
The installation Artista Ausente (Absent Artist) was part of the first collective exhibition based on the funds preserved by BAC – Banco de Arte Contemporânea Maria da Graça Carmona e Costa, revealing a vast and significant set of documentation and works, by artists, galleries and art critics, active since the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition also featured works by other artists, that branch out from its funds, recognizing the multiple potentialities of an archive.
Artista Ausente reflects on posthumous artistic estates, incorporating the unpublished, newly discovered, and yet-to-be-investigated body of work by Marília Torres, inscribing it, as well as Eduardo Nery's color studies, extrapolating the pictorial grid of the project for Avenida Infante Santo onto the wall.
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Lígia Afonso / Marta Guerreiro / Rita Salgueiro
The title Artista Ausente refers to the fact that Fernanda Fragateiro uses the work of the two artists as material for her own work, which apparently leaves her out of the picture, but also brings into discussion what can happen to artists' work after their disappearance, leaving decisions about their legacy entirely in the hands of others. To what extent can the disclosure or concealment of works and archives be manipulated by third parties?
Photos: António Jorge Silva
She always starts by planting a tree
Solo exhibition, Irène Laub gallery, Brussels, 2025
Curated by Marc Dubois
Architecture and sculpture are distinct disciplines, yet they have much in common. Architects thrive on art, while for artists, the built world can be a domain for research, allowing them to incorporate elements into a creative process. The work of Portuguese artist Fernanda Fragateiro positions itself within this creative field. Through publications, she developed a fascination with the work of Belgian architect Marie-José Van Hee (b. 1950). The title of her exhibition at Irène Laub gallery: She always starts by planting a tree is based on a text written by Florian Heilmeyer, published in 2023.
Van Hee does not opt to suggest visual spectacle or movement; she seeks tranquility and restraint. With her attention to detail, use of color, and especially her intense search for the correct proportions of the interior spaces. There is a strong affinity between Fragateiro’s work and Van Hee’s practice. Both are looking for the intimate scale of human experience. Her installation is not meant to illustrate Van Hee’s work, but rather to resonate with it through a broader reflection on memory, modernist legacies, and the transmission of knowledge.
With her installation, Fragateiro aims to bring together aspects of Van Hee’s work, crystallized into fragments, within a well-considered spatial setting. The exhibition space is a defining element in her story. The poetic relationship between the interior and exterior space is one of the themes in the work of both women.
Fragateiro’s white sculpture (Unrepaired 5) can be seen as an abstraction of a floor plan, where subtle proportions are at stake, independent of any functional description. The vertical sculptures Reading Room (green) allude to nature, the tree growing upward. Anyone who studies the oeuvre of Álvaro Siza will note that the presence of a solitary tree, or its planting, is a frequent occurrence. A form of respect and humility that is also present in the oeuvre of Van Hee.
Architectural magazines offer text and images of the concrete world. Usually, they show a discovery of the new and the unknown. Sometimes, they instil a sense of wonder; after all, it remains paper, to be collected or discarded. An important element of the exhibition are the paper sculptures: old publications grouped and cut into blocks. The image of building blocks emerges. Fragateiro approaches books and archives archaeologically by cutting, layering and transforming them. The process is about reconstructing meaning, digging through cultural sediments to give them a new, spatial form.
The Calke Green colour is the one Van Hee often uses in her projects. It is Fernanda Fragateiro’s tribute to this grand dame of Belgian architecture, who, with her homes, built an exceptional oeuvre. In 2024, Van Hee became the first woman to receive the prestigious Alvar Aalto Medal.
The title She always starts by planting a tree can be read as a methodology: to begin by grounding, rooting, preparing. It also suggests a form of feminine lineage – an act of homage that is also generative, opening space for other women’s voices and creative gestures.
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Marc Dubois, architect Hon FRIBA
Van Hee does not opt to suggest visual spectacle or movement; she seeks tranquility and restraint. With her attention to detail, use of color, and especially her intense search for the correct proportions of the interior spaces. There is a strong affinity between Fragateiro’s work and Van Hee’s practice. Both are looking for the intimate scale of human experience. Her installation is not meant to illustrate Van Hee’s work, but rather to resonate with it through a broader reflection on memory, modernist legacies, and the transmission of knowledge.
With her installation, Fragateiro aims to bring together aspects of Van Hee’s work, crystallized into fragments, within a well-considered spatial setting. The exhibition space is a defining element in her story. The poetic relationship between the interior and exterior space is one of the themes in the work of both women.
Fragateiro’s white sculpture (Unrepaired 5) can be seen as an abstraction of a floor plan, where subtle proportions are at stake, independent of any functional description. The vertical sculptures Reading Room (green) allude to nature, the tree growing upward. Anyone who studies the oeuvre of Álvaro Siza will note that the presence of a solitary tree, or its planting, is a frequent occurrence. A form of respect and humility that is also present in the oeuvre of Van Hee.
Architectural magazines offer text and images of the concrete world. Usually, they show a discovery of the new and the unknown. Sometimes, they instil a sense of wonder; after all, it remains paper, to be collected or discarded. An important element of the exhibition are the paper sculptures: old publications grouped and cut into blocks. The image of building blocks emerges. Fragateiro approaches books and archives archaeologically by cutting, layering and transforming them. The process is about reconstructing meaning, digging through cultural sediments to give them a new, spatial form.
The Calke Green colour is the one Van Hee often uses in her projects. It is Fernanda Fragateiro’s tribute to this grand dame of Belgian architecture, who, with her homes, built an exceptional oeuvre. In 2024, Van Hee became the first woman to receive the prestigious Alvar Aalto Medal.
The title She always starts by planting a tree can be read as a methodology: to begin by grounding, rooting, preparing. It also suggests a form of feminine lineage – an act of homage that is also generative, opening space for other women’s voices and creative gestures.
-
Marc Dubois, architect Hon FRIBA
Photos: Amélie Bataille
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Works
A Paleta e o Mundo
Permanent site-specific intervention, Escola Secundária de Camões, Lisboa, 2024
In 2010, I was invited by architect João Pedro Fabio de Campos to collaborate on the project for the revitalization of the Camões Secondary School, a luminous project by architect Ventura Terra, with the task of bringing color to the space. I worked from the idea of restoration as a process that recovers space and memory, while simultaneously constructing history.
My intervention is expressed on the walls of classrooms, laboratories, and some common areas, through a monochromatic mural painting to which a date and a phrase are associated, revealing, in a non-linear way, an event. It is a relational grammar between semantics, form, and color that contaminates architectural space and thought. More than a compilation of shapes, colors, and events, this work exists as an archive that is activated every time someone questions it. It starts a conversation. Because that is what art does.
07.11.2022-14.11.2022 pelo clima unidos ocupamos, resistimos e lutamos por isso ficamos aqui
07.11.2022-14.11.2022 for the climate united we occupy, resist and fight, so we stay here
26.11.1967 cinco mil estudantes uniram-se num gesto enorme de solidariedade
26.11.1967 five thousand students united in a huge gesture of solidarity
(s/data) os alunos saíram da sala descalços para que fosse impossível descobrir a quem faltava um sapato
(n.d.) the students left the classroom barefoot so that it would be impossible to find out who was missing a shoe
1971-1972 sinais do tempo, chegaram ao liceu mais de quinhentas raparigas e uma vice-reitora
1971-1972 signs of the times, more than five hundred girls and a female vice-principal arrived at the school
1926-1929 algo, entretanto, acontecera. o mundo tornava-se maior e outra coisa
1926-1929 something had happened in the meantime. the world became bigger and something else
2019-2024 vieram mãos de muitos lugares para reparar o tempo. obrigade
2019-2024 hands came from many places to repair the time. thank you
My intervention is expressed on the walls of classrooms, laboratories, and some common areas, through a monochromatic mural painting to which a date and a phrase are associated, revealing, in a non-linear way, an event. It is a relational grammar between semantics, form, and color that contaminates architectural space and thought. More than a compilation of shapes, colors, and events, this work exists as an archive that is activated every time someone questions it. It starts a conversation. Because that is what art does.
07.11.2022-14.11.2022 pelo clima unidos ocupamos, resistimos e lutamos por isso ficamos aqui
07.11.2022-14.11.2022 for the climate united we occupy, resist and fight, so we stay here
26.11.1967 cinco mil estudantes uniram-se num gesto enorme de solidariedade
26.11.1967 five thousand students united in a huge gesture of solidarity
(s/data) os alunos saíram da sala descalços para que fosse impossível descobrir a quem faltava um sapato
(n.d.) the students left the classroom barefoot so that it would be impossible to find out who was missing a shoe
1971-1972 sinais do tempo, chegaram ao liceu mais de quinhentas raparigas e uma vice-reitora
1971-1972 signs of the times, more than five hundred girls and a female vice-principal arrived at the school
1926-1929 algo, entretanto, acontecera. o mundo tornava-se maior e outra coisa
1926-1929 something had happened in the meantime. the world became bigger and something else
2019-2024 vieram mãos de muitos lugares para reparar o tempo. obrigade
2019-2024 hands came from many places to repair the time. thank you
Photos: António Jorge Silva
On Love
Solo exhibition, Gallery Bienvenu Steinberg & C, 2024, New York
On Love, Fernanda
Fragateiro’s third exhibition with the gallery. Characterized by her interest in
rethinking and probing modernist practices, Fragateiro's work involves an
archaeological approach to the social, political, and aesthetichistory of
modernism. Through continuous research with material from archives,
documents,and objects, she establishes a nuanced political feminist position by
uncovering the architectural gestures of mostly absent female subjects. In the
annals of history, dormant things lie—unsaid, unfinished, discarded. Fragateiro
reexamines and renders them into three-dimensional form. On Love is a
constellation of conversations with women artists, architects, and
designers—from Elaine Lustig Cohen and Otti Berger, to Lina Bo Bardi and Alison
Smithson who, by becoming the caretakers for history, have been oftentimes
occluded from it.
Photos: courtesy of Bienvenu Steinberg & J
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Works
My dream never has walls
Fernanda Fragateiro and Haleh Redjaian exhibition, Valerie Traan Gallery, 2023, Antwerp
(...) A common inspiration for this exhibition is Lotte Stam-Beese
(1903-1988): an architect, urban planner and photographer. Born in German
Silesia (now Poland), Lotte Beese enrolled as a student at the Bauhaus in
Dessau to study weaving. Prejudices about women studying subjects that were
dominated by and previously reserved for men, led female students into branches
that were considered ‘feminine’. When Hannes Meyer succeeded Walter Gropius as
director, Beese became the first woman to study in the building department. During
the interwar years she worked consecutively in architect’s offices in Berlin,
Moscow, Charkov, Brno, and Amsterdam, and married Dutch architect Mart Stam.
After their divorce she kept the name because this affiliation could give
her a head start as an independent female architect in the Netherlands. From
1946, as chief-architect at the Agency for Urban Development and Reconstruction
of Rotterdam, Stam-Beese worked on several (social) housing districts around
the city. On the one hand, she kept on working with the universalist, rational
principals of Functionalist architecture. On the other hand, she developed
concepts (e.g. ‘neighborhood’ and ‘cluster’) to integrate notions of locality,
diversity, complexity into her architectural grids. (...)
Frank Maes
Frank Maes
Photos: Juan Baraja
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Works
Escola Clandestina
Solo exhibition, Galeria Elba Benítez, 2023, Madrid
Curated by George Stolz
Escola Clandestina centers around a series of sculptures that incorporate rubble from buildings demolished in Lisbon during the city’s current wave of construction and voracious real estate speculation; for Fragateiro, the traces of historical memory the rubble contains highlight the rupture, often violent, between past ideologies and present realities. Retrieved and repurposed within autonomous works of sculpture (among other compositional elements, some found, others newly fabricated), the functionless rubble can “assert” itself in ways it could not while functional, expressing its formal and material qualities as well as the social, political and economic themes it encapsulates. Moreover, the works’ rough-edged yet delicate geometrical abstractions overtly recall architecture plans — indeed, some of the compositions are based directly on floor plans by the German-Dutch architect Lotte Stam-Beese, one of the first women to study architecture at the Bauhaus and later a significant figure in the post-WWII urban development in Rotterdam — furthering the cycles of historical linkage and conceptual layering.
George Stolz
George Stolz
Photos: Luis Asin
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Works
The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor. El lissitzky: The Self-Portrait as the Kestner Gesellschaft
Group exhibition, Kestner Gesellschaft, 2023, Hannover
Curated by Adam Budak
In hall 3 of Kestner Gesellschaft Gallery, the artist presented (e)motion still, an installation made of several vertical elements that created graceful geometric figures reaching up to the ceiling. The piece is made of tubular, polish and painted stainless steel and they are suspended from de ceiling and can have different configurations in space.
Photos: Volker Crone
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Works
Em bruto: relações comoventes
Solo exhibition,
Fundacão Centro Cultural de Belem, 2023, Lisbon
Curated by Alfredo Puente
Em Bruto: Relações Comoventes, is a project that remains in constant evolution. Beginning in 2020 as a commission through the curatorial area of the Fundación
Cerezales Antonino y Cinia. The project correlates a wide
range of concepts with the
powerful political and poetic
charge that has been present
throughout Fragateiro’s
work.
“Seeing, touching and drawing are actions that can ramify the future, and the “construction site” embodies the artist’s intention to build and model this future together. It places us in an expectant territory between sculpture, architecture, and drawing, and invites us to observe ourselves within it.” by Alfredo Puente
Photos: António Jorge Silva
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Works
Em bruto: relações comoventes
Solo exhibition,
Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, 2022, Léon
Curated by Alfredo Puente
Photos: Juan Baraja
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Works
Singular Plural
Solo exhibition, Irène Laub Gallery, Brussels,
2021
Curated by Gregory Lang
Photos: Bruno Lopes
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Works
A Cidade Incompleta
Solo exhibiton, Museu
de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas, Elvas, 2021
Curated by Delfim Sardo
“This exhibition by Fernanda Fragateiro was specifically designed for MACE space, trying that each room has a specific ambience through a different element of our relationship with space. Throughout the exhibition, a set of objects (generically entitled Materials Lab) emerges, as a lexicon of the artist's references, helping us to understand her connections to specific places, political struggles, and the poetics of social transformation.”
“A Cidade Incompleta”
Text by Delfim Sardo
“A Cidade Incompleta”
Text by Delfim Sardo
Photos:
António Jorge Silva
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Works
Pitching itself a tent where they all may enter
Group exhibition, Centro de Arte Quetzal, Vidigueira,
2021
Curated by Aveline de Bruin and Luiza Teixeira de
Freitas
Photos: Gonçalo F. Santos
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Works
Monotony is Nice
Solo exhibition, Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon, 2020
Photos: António Jorge Silva—
Works
Processo
Solo exhibition, MEIAC Santo Tirso, 2018
Curated by Álvaro Moreira
Photos: António Jorge Silva
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Works
Demo
Solo exhibition, ARRATIA BEAR, Berlin, 2017
Photos: Torben Höke
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Works
Duplo Negativo
Installation project for Anozero, Biennial of Contemporary Art of Coimbra, Coimbra, 2017
Photos: António Jorge Silva
Fernanda Fragateiro: dos arquivos, à matéria, à construção
Solo exhibition, MAAT, Lisboa, 2017
Curated by Sara Antónia Matos
Photos: António Jorge Silva
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Works
The Reserve of Things in their Latent State
Solo exhibition, Fundação Eugénio de Almeida, Évora, 2017
Curated by Adam Budak
Photos: António Jorge Silva
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Works
After Lygia Clark
Galería Elba Benitez, Frieze New York 2016, New York, 2016
Photos: Kaz Senju
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Works
Landscape Non-Landscape
Solo exhibition at Studio Sandra Recio, Geneva, Switzerland, 2015
Photo: António Jorge Silva
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Works
Stones Against Diamonds
Solo exhibition, NC-arte, Bogotá, Colombia, 2014
Photos: Oscar Monsalve
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Works
R9F6PBRANCO
Collaboration between artist Fernanda Fragateiro and architect Rui Mendes.
Exhibition at White Pavillion, City Museum, Lisbon, 2013
Photos: Bruno Lopes
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Works
Common Front / Frente Común
Solo project at Zona Maco — Mexico Arte Contemporáneo 2013
Photo: Miguel Ângelo Guerreiro
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Works
Pensar é Destruir
3200 Terracotta mosaic "Bejmate, Blanc Nacré". Artisanal production, Meknés, Morocco Variable dimensions
Photo: Miguel Ângelo Guerreiro
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Works
Bildraum
Solo exhibition, ARRATIA BEER, 2009, Berlin
In the process of analyzing and rediscovering a historical context, Fragateiro comes to embody it in her sculptures, reiterating and modifying its aesthetics as she suggests alterations to its history. It is this strategy that forms the basis for several pieces in Bildraum, her series of work from 2009-10: that draws on the work and biography of the German designer and architect Lilly Reich (1885-1947).
This personal and design history- intertwined inextricably with Mies’, encompassing assistance and collaboration in overlapping venues and with similar styles - has never been fully clarified. As Christiane Lange writes in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe & Lilly Reich: Furniture and Interiors, “they developed a common creative use of forms that they repeated and varied,” but these designs have been attributed predominantly to Mies.
This personal and design history- intertwined inextricably with Mies’, encompassing assistance and collaboration in overlapping venues and with similar styles - has never been fully clarified. As Christiane Lange writes in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe & Lilly Reich: Furniture and Interiors, “they developed a common creative use of forms that they repeated and varied,” but these designs have been attributed predominantly to Mies.
Photos: Astrid Busch
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