Artists Ana Jotta
Venue Le Crédac
Photography DMF Daniel Malhão Fotografia, Lda
At Le Crédac, Jotta is showing several of her emblematic series, including Jotas. Playing off the Portuguese homonym of her surname, the letter j, or jota, from the start of her career she has been gathering and fashioning a disparate group of sculptures that have the curved shape of that letter and which she exhibits in families of works. In another series, movie screens that are painted or drawn by hand depict decorative motifs like wallpaper, landscapes, and figures. Moreover, titles like Il Profumo della Signora in Nero (The Perfume of the Lady in Black) or Le Bonheur des tristes (The Happiness of the Sad) open up narrative perspectives.
Jotta breaks down all borders between art and life. She is a gleaner and subverts references, citations, and found objects, creating a fertile, iconoclastic body of work. Making, always making seems to be the constant watchword in the development of an art that is both modest and prolific.
Ana Jotta was born in 1946 in Lisbon, where she currently lives and works. She studied art at Lisbon’s School of Fine Arts (1965-68) and Brussels’ School of Architecture and Visual Arts of the Abbaye de la Cambre (1969-73), before embracing a career in acting and writing for the stage and cinema in the 1970s. It was in the 1980s that she began to focus on the visual arts. She has been the subject of a retrospective show at the Museu de Serralves, Porto (2005), and solo shows at Culturgest, Lisbon (2016, 2012), 8 rue SaintBon (2015), and Level One, gb agency, Paris (2013).
