Portugal: Collection of Yoko Ono’s art to be exhibited at Serralves museum, Porto

The Serralves Museum, in Porto, opens this Saturday the exhibition “The Garden of Freedom Learning”, by Yoko Ono, where works such as “Apple” and “EX IT” will be exhibited.

In an interview with the Lusa agency, the museum’s director and curator, Philippe Vergne, said that the exhibition is marked by some historical pieces, such as the work “Apple” (1966) and Yoko Ono’s book of instructions and drawings “Grapefruit”, in which the artist shows how the public can make artworks at home.

“In the historical work we have ‘Apple’, which is a kind of icon of Yoko Ono. There is one work that is very discreet and not spectacular, from the point of view of the object, which is the book ‘Grapefruit’ (1964), in which Yoko Ono gives all the conceptual definitions and instructions so that the public can build the works themselves”.

Philippe Vergne also highlights “EX IT”, a work made in the 1990s consisting of a hundred coffins of various sizes – man, woman, child – and a hundred trees that emerge from them, being a “metaphor built by the association of life (tree) and death”, explains a statement from the museum.

The exhibition, which has a total of 297 exhibits, extends to Parque de Serralves, where items of language are erected about two metres in area, as well as works such as “Garden Sets”.

In the exhibition “The Garden of Freedom Learning” we can see the “universality” of the artist – the widow of the musician John Lennon – and how she managed to “crystallize an era” in her works, considered Philippe Vergne, referring that the artist has always fought against all types of violence, namely violence against women.

“Violence against women is one of the themes of Yoko Ono’s work, but also violence in general,” said the museum director.

“It’s the first time there’s been a major exhibition of Yoko Ono in Portugal and I hope the Portuguese public will be interested, because it’s an exhibition that, on the one hand, addresses very serious, problematic issues that began in the 20th century and that continue to build our era like racism,” Vergne said.

On the other hand, he added, “it’s an interactive exhibition, and gives the idea of freedom to the public to touch the works”, considering that Yoko Ono “brought honour to the status of ‘avant garde’ artist and marked the history of art in the second half of the 20th century”.

The exhibition also shows several films, some of them made in partnership with John Lennon, in which the “traditional notion of directing” is challenged to belong to the “American current of the culture of independent film of the 1960s”.

The exhibition will also have some performances created by the artist, such as “Bag Piece” (1964), which invites the viewer to enter a bag, which can be individual or double and undress and get dressed again, because inside a bag a person is “just soul, stripped of any differentiating characteristic”, of color, age or sex.

This exhibition covers the artist’s production since the first works conceived still in the 1950’s until today and was “designed specifically for the spaces of the Serralves Museum”.

Yoko Ono, 86, was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1933 and moved to New York in 1953 after studying philosophy in her home country.

The artist’s name is linked to the artistic collective Fluxus, whose founder, George Maciunas, gave her the opportunity to present her first solo exhibition, in 1961.

Yoko Ono’s exhibition will be open in Serralves until November 15th.