With Miguel Leal Rios acting as the curator for the collection, the two brothers decided to open the Leal Rios Foundation up to the public in 2012, using a 1 000-sqaure-meter former auto repair shop as its space. Located just south of Lisbon’s airport the collection presents works of all genres of contemporary art in temporary, themed exhibitions every year.

In addition to national artists such as Helena Almeida, Francico Tropa, Julião Sarmento or João Penalva the collection also inludes internationally recognized names such as Erwin Wurm, Matt Mullican, Lawrence Weiner, Anthony McCall, John Baldessari, Becky Beasley and Allan Sekula, as well as regularly devoting the exhibition space to presentations centered on design.

Until April 7th 2018 the Leal Rios Foundation will be presenting “Near Fields”, an exhibition made up exclusively of works from the private collection, featuring the artists João Paulo Feliciano, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Anthony McCall, Tristan Perich, Pedro Diniz Reis, Scott Short, Rui Toscano and Jorinde Voigt.

Here, we present artworks and installation views from the exhibition “Near Fields” at the Leal Rios Foundation.

Since the invention of wireless communication, like the telegraph or the photo phone, in the late 19th century, humans have been trying to expand their senses with artificial and mass-produced devices. Vision, hearing, voice and writing gained extensions such as radio, television, the telephone and, more recently, the Internet. This flux of information and processing obeys to a system of code, transmission, decoding, reception, etc. This flow of information is not naturally intelligible: without the right instruments to extract, separate and decode them, they are nothing but noise to our senses. With this reality in mind, Near Fields brings together a selection of works of art that overlap multiple media and project certain modes of action in the mental and in the exhibition space, presenting themselves as a play of forces that invites the viewer to interact with them at different levels of proximity, scale, position, or movement.

IN "NEAR FIELDS", JOÃO BISCAINHO, APRIL 2017

The Leal Rios Foundation is featured in the Art Guide.