❮ Portugal

Gallery

Jul 11 - Nov 18 2026 - 48 days left

Balcony Gallery and artist Laura Caetano are pleased to invite you to visit "9", her first solo exhibition at the gallery, opening on July 11, Saturday, at 6 pm. During a conversation with Laura in her studio, we spoke about the experience of creating images on images, those devoid of any meaning beyond their aesthetic quality. We quickly arrived at clichéd categorisations of what defines an artist and the ideas surrounding the desire for pure painting. She concluded: “the hands are the painter’s ultimate tool,” admitting that her own obsessions shared this universal matrix. It is as though this icon functions as a common language, serving as a painter’s truest self-portrait. [...] Text by Francisca Portugal

Oct 09 - Nov 20 2026

Galeria Balcony presents "Dá-me uma gotinha de água", Tiago Alexandre’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, curated by Domenico de Chirico. The exhibition will open on October 9 at 10:00 PM. "There is a land where water is scarce, where the landscape parches under the grip of drought, and memory slowly settles like dust upon the earth. This is Alentejo, a region in southern Portugal where Tiago Alexandre’s family originates, and where the artist spent his childhood summers alongside a family member. Fishing, animals, motorcycles, lagoons: a universe of experiences that helped construct an affective imaginary destined to resurface many years later. Dá-me uma gotinha de água takes its title from a traditional Alentejan folk song. In its original form, the phrase serves as a sort of prayer directed toward an arid land and its thirst for water. In Tiago Alexandre’s exhibition, however, that same plea takes on a more intimate meaning: it becomes the manifestation of a need for love, care, and affection. An elemental request, yet impossible to ignore: give me at least one small drop. Alexandre’s practice takes shape at the intersection of experience, longing, and imagination, typically spanning sculpture, drawing, video, painting, and found objects. Everyday images, situations, and fragments often serve as his starting point. Rather than simply reproducing them, the artist alters their perception in order to exorcise them, observing what happens when they are displaced from their original context. Across the exhibition, seemingly simple elements — an animal, a basin, a candle, a shell — become vehicles through which the familiar opens up to new layers of meaning, ultimately coming together into a single, necessary, and collective song. Far beyond a physical thirst in the Alentejan landscape, water functions here as an emotional conduit: the element through which buried memories resurface. As the philosopher Gaston Bachelard suggests, water is a privileged element of the imagination: it does not merely reflect what we have lived, but transforms it, bringing it into the present through images, associations, and recollections. In its restless movement, in its capacity to seep and penetrate, water embodies the very rhythm of existence: the continuous shift between life and death, memory and oblivion, while offering the possibility of purification and rebirth." Text by Domenico de Chirico