Spring/summer 2025 programme

Galeria Municipal do Porto presents the four projects currently on view in its premises at the Jardins do Palácio de Cristal. Launching a new annual open-air commission, Andreas Angelidakis reimagines the courtyard as a ruinous, participatory playground. Indoors, solo exhibitions by Pauline Curnier Jardin, Mónica de Miranda, and Francisco Pedro Oliveira engage with themes of ritual and desire, utopian memory, and vernacular spirituality. Spanning film, performance, installation, and sculpture, these projects offer immersive and playful reflections on materiality, embodiment, and imaginative resistance.

Andreas Angelidakis: Beach Ruins
May 10–October 12, 2025
Curated by João Laia

Inspired by the Grand Tours of the 17th to 19th centuries — elite journeys in search of classical antiquity — Beach Ruins by Athens-based artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis reimagines the gallery’s courtyard as a ruinous, open-air lounge. Giant soft columns, doubling as inhabitable sculptures are paired with parasols to form a mutable landscape — a space for leisure and critical reflection. The installation invites public interaction, blurring the boundaries between monument and furniture, rest and critique.

Subverting fixed ideas of heritage, tourism, class, and taste, Beach Ruins explores the afterlives of ruins and the performative occupation of public space. The project inaugurates a new annual open-air commission, presented each summer in the gardens of the Galeria Municipal do Porto, expanding the gallery’s programme into the landscape around it.

Pauline Curnier Jardin: Deep Scarlet, Scream Ruby—The Freestanding Joys
March 29–June 15, 2025
Curated by João Laia

In her first solo exhibition in Portugal, Marseille-born Pauline Curnier Jardin evokes the image of a travelling circus arriving in town, echoing the recent past of the Jardins do Palácio de Cristal as a venue for Expos, funfairs and theme parks. Drawing from religious pageantry, folk rituals, and subcultural aesthetics to challenge traditional structures of power and desire, the project channels the anarchic energy of carnival — rituals of reversal, an embrace of excess, and the ability to destabilise social order.

Mónica de Miranda: Depth of Field
March 29–June 15, 2025
Curated by João Laia and Nuno Crespo

Spanning video, performance and installation, Porto-born Mónica de Miranda's exhibition questions opposing forces between dynamics such as presence and absence, detachment and connection or history and memory. It inhabits a time held between fiction and reality, where the potential to reconsider the past and imagine alternative futures intersect via discursive and performative actions proposed as part of the show.

Depth of Field unfolds in two city venues: Galeria Municipal do Porto and Escola das Artes | Universidade Católica Portuguesa, and it is part of the Bienal’25 Fotografia do Porto, organized by Ci.CLO.

Francisco Pedro Oliveira: Primal Form
March 29–June 22, 2025
Curated by Isabeli Santiago

In a liminal space between abstraction and materiality, Porto-based Francisco Pedro Oliveira proposes an aesthetic and spiritual experience. The immersive installation articulates the artist’s ecosystem of interests: Portuguese ethnography, apotropaic phenomena, vernacular knowledge and syncretic notions of spirituality.

Primal Form is Francisco Pedro Oliveira’s first institutional solo exhibition, as part of a new programming strand that strengthens Galeria Municipal do Porto's commitment to embrace and promote the city's burgeoning art scene.