Pretending

- Fingindo ou Fingimento Izumi Ueda Yuu, Luís Almeida, D. Dominick Lombardi, Run Jiang

Pretending_Fingindo ou Fingimento

Izumi Ueda Yuu, Luís Almeida, D. Dominick Lombardi, Run Jian

November 8 - December 30, 2025

Vernissage/Opening: Friday, November 7 at 7 pm

Open every Tuesday, Thursday & Friday: 13H-17H or any other day by appointment

Artist Statements

Izumi Ueda Yuu

I was born in Japan after the war as a baby boomer. Since 2015 I have lived and worked in Lisbon. I’m interested in the notion of animism, that things we are surrounded by can be spirited and respected. I create images and objects with familiar shapes from everyday life. I draw, paint, print, collage and cast paper sculptures. The texture of paper can be like they are our own skin. I want my work to be breathing and paper is perfect material for it

Bio:
Izumi Ueda Yuu is a Japanese-born visual artist who lives and works in Lisbon. Yuu attended Kuwasawa Design School in Tokyo and received her BFA in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art. She is a shortlist for The Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize 2025 and a finalist for the Luxembourg Art Prize 2019. She has had solo exhibitions at Museu do Oriente, 2016, and Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes 2018&2024, “Ocean is There”. She is a two-time recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council grant for individual artists and has been an artist in residence at Foundation OBRAS (Portugal), OBRAS-Holland, Atelier Outotsu (Osaka), and Awagami Factory (Yoshinogawa).Lu

Luís Almeida

For the last ten years, my artistic practice was almost only focused on drawing. I used charcoal for many years because of the directness and fastness with which I can work with that material. And the high contrasted result between black and white always appealed to me. I recently began painting with oil, which I appreciate very much. It’s a different medium which requires a longer time to work on and working with colors opened a new world for me. My work is figurative and I'm not searching only for a realistic or naturalistic approach. My approach is a mix of several comic and cartoonish intentions, and it reveals a figurative/ adolescent world where the narrative is put aside in order for an agglomeration of many small stories to keep building the space and to start creating connections between them

Bio:
Born in 1985 in Lisbon, Portugal. Graduated in Basic and Advanced Course of Fine Arts at the Ar.Co school (2013, Lisbon). The individual exhibitions include: Heads Will Roll, Gallery Braço Perna 44 (Lisbon, 2024); Hi, It’s me Johnny, A Base (Lisbon, 2024); Caylus, MU.SA - Museu das Artes de Sintra (Sintra, 2024); (Re)Descobrir os Mestres, Solar dos Zagalos (Almada, 2023); Strange Days, Quase Galeria, (Porto, 2022); Playing with Fire, Galeria Alecrim 50, (2017, Lisbon); Santa Fé, Espace Pilote (Paris, 2016) and O Paraíso Não É Por Aí…, Galeria Alecrim 50 (2016, Lisbon).
Among the collective projects, the following stand out: Whose Masks - New edition, Galeria Nova Ogiva (Óbidos, 2023); Various Positions, BAG - Banco das Artes Galeria (2022, Leiria); Whose Masks, Quinta Magnólia Cultural Center, (2021, Funchal); Orto di Incendio, National Museum of Contemporary Art (2019, Lisbon) / Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, (2019, Rome); 66th Jeune Création edition, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (2016, Paris).

D. Dominick Lombardi

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life andyou will call it fate." Carl Jung

As a child, I have distinct memories of making small drawings of strange fish that I would cut out and move around in circles on the floor, as I imagined I was playing in the ocean. Today, I strongly believe that the studio is the ultimate sanctuary where one can fully control thought, reason, movement, aesthetic decisions and solve the puzzle of creating. My most recent series of paintings in “Fingindo ou Fingimento (Pretending)” are an investigation into the influence of the collective unconscious. During the more critical days of the COVID shutdown, I made thousands of tiny drawings that captured unconscious visual prompts. Today, I am revisiting a handful of the more curious drawings done at that time as subjects of paintings. I do this with the hope of better understanding the endless connection we all have to unconscious thoughts and images.

Bio:

D. Dominick Lombardi is an artist, writer and curator. Before Covid, he was represented by Kim Foster Gallery, New York, NY. Currently, Lombardi is represented by Prince Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark, and is currently looking for representation in NYC. In addition to those types of relationships, Lombardi has been a part a series of exhibitions, curating shows at a variety of institutions including the Morean Arts Center in St. Petersburg, FL; and the Hampden Gallery in Amherst, MA.

Lombardi has written features and art criticisms that have been published in the The Brooklyn Rail, New Art Examiner, Art & Antiques, Two Coats of Paint, The WeirdShow, Whitehot, ARTES, The Huffington Post, ARTslant, Art Experience NYC, Public Art and Ecology Magazine (China), The New York Times, Sculpture, Sculpture Review, d'ART (U.S. Editor), Art in Asia (S.Korea), Art Papers, Art Lies, ARTnews, & magazine, Juxtapoz, New Art Examiner, Art New England, NYARTS magazine, culturecatch and others

Run Jiang

My work often talks about intimacy. As an artist, I want my work to achieve a universal connection by expressing something extremely personal. I intend to convey not just the intimate content, but also a direct sense of honesty, an invitation to a private world. The “dream drawing series” is one of them. I experience virtual things in our dreams, but produce real emotions, which can even affect my actions in reality. They are like a story of my own subconscious investigation. It’s me, but not me, who invented them. Since 2012, I began to note my dreams every morning and then draw them down. After being registered, they seem to become some real memories, rather than a virtual passing moment. Later, I began to do the “mixed dreams series”, using prints of my “dream drawings” as collage pieces, to combine a new virtual world.

Bio:

Born in 1986 in Dalian, Run Jiang is a Chinese artist based in Lisbon.
She studied drawing from an early age and attended both middle school and high school, specializing in art.
She graduated from the China Academy of Art in Cinema and Publicity (2009) and obtained her master's degree in plastic arts with Jury’s Congratulations in Marseille Fine Art School (2013). She then passed a one-year learning theatre at the University of Paris 8.
In 2015, she emigrated to Portugal, becoming a resident artist at Mart Art residency, where she received a Scholarship (2017-2018). In 2017, she was selected as an artist for the 11th Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Prize (Portugal) and was one of the nominees of The FID Prize (France).
She has shown her work in Portugal and elsewhere. Her work was collected by many institutions, including Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Gulbenkian Art Library, Camões Institution, and the University of Tor Vergata.
She is now represented by Braçoperna44 Gallery in Lisbon, Portugal.

Still There

- Shooting Stills, Shooting Blanks

A contemporary Photography Exhibition

by Randy Eriksen & Gonzalo Ponce

Still There _Shooting Stills, Shooting Blanks

A Contemporary Photography Exhibition by Randy Eriksen & Gonzalo Ponce

August 1 - October 31, 2025

Vernissage/Opening: Friday, August at 7 pm

Open every Friday: 13H-17H or any day by appointment

Artist Statements

Randy Eriksen

This series of images is a visual metaphor for forgetfulness and memory loss that often come with aging. Our minds are impressed with experiences which become memories, much like walls are painted, papered, and etched.
Over time, these memories can weather, age, and fade, or be pasted over with new impressions, defaced by dementia, smeared with senility. What once was in focus, clear, and whole, are now remnants, shadows, rough daubs, and careless encrustations of cryptic recollection.

I use my camera to document these losses, these baffling transformations. Just as an old mind has been affected by many people and many places, so too have the images I photograph been altered by time, nature, and the human hand. As with memory, the simple beauty of purity has been supplanted by the entangled aesthetics of entropy.

Bio:
Randy Eriksen (b. 1954) has been a practicing amateur photographer since the early 1970s. In addition to creating art and photography, Eriksen recently retired after over 35 years as a property master in the film and television industry. He emigrated with his wife, Dorothy Bulac-Eriksen, to Portugal in 2022. His photographs have been exhibited in galleries, cafés, and bookshops throughout Seattle and Southern California. His artwork includes straight photography, photo-sculpture, and both digital and analog photo-collage. He currently lives and works in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal.

Gonzalo Ponce

My photographic work is composed of shapes, spaces, and people that stand apart from everyday life. These images capture corners and abstractions—spaces inhabited by color and form that seem to call out, even if they might otherwise have been forgotten.
Colors inside a prison, a drag queen from Valparaíso, Chile, a flower breaking through concrete… the quiet loneliness of objects that appear inert yet feel strangely alive —these are the elements of this exhibition.

In these photographs, people and places seem to lean on one another, each helping the other remain visible—to be remembered, to exist. The images are bound together by a palette of red, green, and blue tones, offering a sense of chromatic unity. I came to understand this only gradually, through years of practice.
Still There is a tribute to overlooked corners —and to the people who persist in them— remaining present, resisting disappearance.

Bio:
Born in Santiago, Chile.
Gonzalo Ponce (b. 1986) studied advertising photography but later developed a deep interest in documentary photography.
Ponce worked for over ten years as a news correspondent for various Chilean media outlets and was also on staff at the Italian news agency NurPhoto. This experience allowed him to develop alternative bodies of work separate from his formal assignments.
His photography has been shown in both group and solo exhibitions, including the International Photography Festival of Valparaíso (FIFV) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile. He currently lives and works in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal