Porto City Hall announces the finalists of Paulo Cunha e Silva Art prize

The Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize was created by the City Council of Porto as a tribute to the former Councillor for Culture, who held office from September 2013 until his death on November 11, 2015.

Porto City Hall has announced the names of the 48 Grand Finalists of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Prize, chosen by a committee made up of the most relevant curators at international level.

The full list of selected artists was announced with the publication of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Prize website, a project of the Câmara do Porto that honours the Councillor of Culture.

The Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize is sponsored by Fundação Millenium bcp. This art prize is aimed at international artists under the age of 40, with no more than one solo exhibition in prominent galleries. The winning project will receive a monetary prize (the main award) of EUR 25,000 and the winner will present a solo exhibition at Galeria Municipal do Porto in 2018.

The jury of the first edition of the Prize are João Laia, Julião Sarmento, Meg Stuart and Vicente Todolí, who have recommended 16 renowned curators, such as Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Galleries, UK), Elena Filipovic (Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland), Nancy Spector (Guggenheim Museum), Catherine Wood (UK), Benjamin Weil (Botín Center, Spain) or Venus Lau (OCAT Shenzen, China), who have in turn named three artists.

The prize winner will be chosen from the 48 selected artists, and the award will be presented to the winner by June 2017.

See here for more information on the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize.

Rui Moreira, Mayor of Porto Municipality once said:

"To hold an exhibition to honour Paulo Cunha e Silva signifies organising a discourse about a whole universe that is easier to experience than to explain. It means to revisit pulses of light and grace, to rediscover places built with humour and speed, to comprehend a system with references, people and connections, to recreate a map composed of vertiginous paths, sensitive to the abstract and to the concrete, to understand fascinating rhizomes of concepts and proposals. Nothing appeared to come to an end. There was only energy and future. To hold an exhibition to honour Paulo Cunha e Silva signifies consistency and difficulty. It means longing, also fairness and pride. With us, stays that smile that he always kept. Until losing sight of him. Here are his ideas, hovering, the intense and the rough ones, that often times were the most profound - just like the skin, as he used to say. And like the dot after Porto is not a full stop, this cannot be an end point; rather, it is the starting point towards something greater, unquestionably indefinable; to an existence that will never depart from the city and that the city will never forget. Because his only skyline was what was yet to be done. "