Manuel Baptista - (In)visible Archives

From July 26, 2026 to September 30, 2026

Manuel Baptista welcomed his ghosts with enthusiasm: memories, fantasies, archives that he preserved even when they were no longer useful. In his studio, drawings, notebooks, sketches, and unfinished works accumulated in a permanent state of becoming. It was as if everything was born from the same inaugural stroke — the stroke of memory — fed by the insistence on returning to childhood, to the toys he collected, and to the works of artists who marked him and became part of his own phantasmagoria.

This exhibition pays homage to that enthusiasm and to the hospitality with which Manuel Baptista welcomed his own ghosts. The drawings presented here, chosen from hundreds that remained carefully stored at the bottom of the piles in his studio, reveal an intimate universe of notes, sketches, ideas, and obsessions. Some transformed into autonomous works; others fed paintings, sculptures, and projects that marked his journey. The archive was never, for Manuel Baptista, a place of conservation, but a living space of transformation.

Among the drawings, mostly from the 1960s, an emblematic sculpture is also presented. The large Yarn Balls, which existed for decades only as drawings and reminiscences of childhood in the Algarve recorded in his notebooks, materialized only in 2011, in the exhibition Out of Scale, at the Museum of Electricity/EDP Foundation, curated by João Pinharanda. They are a paradigmatic example of how, in Manuel Baptista's work, time never closes an image: it remains latent, waiting for the moment to acquire a new form.

More than revisiting a set of drawings, this exhibition invites us to enter that living archive where memory, imagination, and creation remain inseparable. It is a meeting with an artist whose work continues to grow beyond his absence, inhabited by the ghosts he knew how to transform into images.

Curated by: Edgar Massul, Pedro Cabral Santo, and Mirian Tavares.