Overview
Julião Sarmento, Portugal’s most influential and celebrated artist, creates a new exhibition for Cincinnati at the Contemporary Arts Center that explores literature and books as a theme.
The show presents the book as a visual object and addresses the artist’s unique relationship to certain books that have informed his work. It includes large-scale, re-imagined covers of books that have impacted the artist, as well as portraits of the actress Sasha Grey, star of Steven Soderbergh’s film The Girlfriend Experience, photographed in the act of reading.
Sarmento was born in 1948 in Lisbon and studied painting and architecture at the University of Fine Arts in Lisbon. Today he lives and works in Estoril, Portugal. His exhibition history is extensive. He has represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale and his works are included in the collection of the MoMA and Guggenheim in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
