a siza vieira in chaves, with nadir afonso inside
There's a strange logic to finding an Álvaro Siza Vieira building in an inland Trás-os-Montes city, a few kilometres from the Spanish border. But that's exactly what happens here, and the contrast makes sense as soon as you get who Nadir Afonso is: a Chaves-born painter who spent his life working with geometry and colour with an almost scientific seriousness, and who in 1982 left fifteen works to the municipality before the museum even existed.
The MACNA opened in 2016, forty years after that initial donation. The collection grew in the meantime through several routes: protocols with the Fundação Nadir Afonso, works by Cutileiro, pieces shown at the 2017 Venice Biennale donated by Australian sculptor Peter Rosman, and a fund that includes Vieira da Silva, Paula Rego, Júlio Pomar and Helena Almeida. For a municipal museum operating outside the major centres, that's a collection with real weight.
The permanent collection is Nadir Afonso's; the temporary shows have already brought Serralves, the Museu do Chiado and Culturgest to the banks of the Tâmega.
nadir afonso: geometry as obsession
Nadir Afonso was born in Chaves in 1920 and studied architecture before turning to painting. He worked with Le Corbusier and with Oscar Niemeyer. You can see that on the canvas: the geometric abstraction he practised for decades has an almost urbanistic structure, as if each composition were a plan seen from above.
His relationship with Chaves wasn't nostalgia or sentimental return. It was a formal relationship, kept up through decades of donations and protocols, which ended up generating a museum built from scratch for his work. Seeing the canvases in the context of a Siza Vieira is realising that the dialogue between the two languages isn't accidental.
what you'll find
- Siza Vieira architecture in an unexpected setting
- a permanent collection centred on geometric abstraction
- works by João Cutileiro, Vieira da Silva and Paula Rego in the holdings
- temporary exhibitions with loans from reference national institutions
- a calm space, away from the pressure of the big-city museums
