Gulbenkian Anniversary 50 Years of Portuguese Art

50 Anos de Arte Portuguesa was a group exhibition organised by the Fine Arts Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation as part of the institution's fiftieth anniversary celebrations, held at the Foundation's headquarters in Lisbon in 2007. It brought together nearly one hundred works spanning fifty years of Portuguese art history, drawing from the collection of the Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão (CAMJAP), alongside archival documents relating to artists who had received grants and scholarships from the Foundation's Central Department since 1957. Curated by Raquel Henriques da Silva, professor of Art History at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and former museum director, the exhibition aimed to help audiences make new readings of the preceding half-century of Portuguese art and to question established hierarchies within it. The show spanned a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, and multimedia, reflecting the breadth and evolution of Portuguese artistic production across that period. It was both a celebratory and critically revisionist gesture, using the Foundation's own anniversary as an opportunity to reassess its role in shaping and supporting the national art scene.