My Plan For Japan
2023 | Hillside Fórum Tokyo | Tokyo, Japan.
Solo exhibition. Images by Miguel C. Tavares.
Imagination, not memory, guides the mental and graphic constructions of "My Plan for Japan", composed mainly of "paper architecture" essays. The central work does not deviate from the principles that characterize the author's work: the extreme care for detail, the obsession for rigor, the ritual of repetition, the demand for the just composition of drawings made entirely by hand. Accepting error, seeking perfection, this is the design of all the drawings presented here. Japan is AA's favorite country, she confesses, and everything is born from the impact caused by the total loss of the (behavioral) mental codes of a western woman confronted with the invisible but infallible rules that organize life inside and outside the fascinating gigantic Japanese city.
Presented at the illustrious Hillside Forum Gallery in Tokyo from 30th of May to 04th of June 2023. The exhibition was part of the official commemorations of the 480th anniversary of the Portuguese arrival in Japan.
Vanishing Points
2023 | London Roca Gallery | London, UK.
Collective exhibition. Images by Ana Aragão.
“Vanishing Points: Architectural Imagination in the Digital Universe” is an exciting new exhibition curated by architect and author Hamza Shaikh, in collaboration with Drawing Matter, and hosted by Roca London Gallery from the 9th of February to the 29th of July 2023.
The exhibition features historical architectural drawings from the incredible Drawing Matter archive, alongside a selection of modern works carefully selected by Hamza. Within the exhibition, you will find historical pieces juxtaposed with new, to show how drawing has not only been used throughout history to represent and circulate innovative ideas, but how it continues to inspire and push innovation forwards.
Interferências
2022 | MAAT | Lisbon, Portugal
Collective exhibition. Images by Ana Aragão.
Interferências is an exhibition that affirms different expressions of urban culture, exploring narrative itineraries of the city through a dialogue that privileges the museum as a critical space, a meeting place between various communities and sensibilities. The MAAT is thus transformed into a stage for utopias and timeless struggles, for emerging tensions, for stories told and untold.
The exhibition features well known Portuguese artists like Julião Sarmento, +MaisMenos+, Carlos Bunga or Wasted Rita. The curatorship was carried out by Carla Cardoso, Brito Guterres and VHILS.
No Plan for Japan
2021-2022 | Fundação do Oriente | Lisbon, Portugal
Solo exhibition. Photography by Pedro Sadio.
Japan, in all its plenitude, now serves as the motto for the sketcher Ana Aragão to create this exhibition, properly titled No Plan for Japan. The artist once again shows the excellence of her work in the graphic interpretation of the world, bringing together the real of architecture and the go illustration in the creation of chaos, filled with meaning, which blends fantasy and reality.
The exhibition, composed by 47 works predominantly accomplished with pen and colored pencils, divided into six collections, is an invitation for observers to lose themselves in the details and unspoken meanings.
by Carlos Augusto Pulido Valente Monjardino, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Fundação do Oriente.
Galeria X
2020 | Rectorate of the University of Oporto | Oporto, Portugal.
Solo exhibition. Images by Rui Manuel Vieira.
Galeria X is an expression of the idea of collection, presented by the sequence of three gallery spaces: The Possible Gallery, The Gallery Under Construction and the Ideal Gallery.
The first one showed a selection of works that represent moments of change in Ana’s career. The Gallery Under Construction shows documents and note books, revealing processes of hesitation, forgotten ideas and and postponed epiphanies. At the last space - The Ideal Gallery - the paper architectures are questioned, and the visitor is invited to interact mentally with the virtual and illustrated space.
This exhibition was curated by Rui Manuel Vieira.
S. M. L. LX.
2019 | National Society of Fine Arts | Lisbon, Portugal
Solo exhibition. Images by Ana Aragão Atelier.
Invited by the National Society of Fine Arts, Ana Aragão presents her project about Lisbon entitled S.M.L.LX. With illustrations composed only of buildings, showing the connection to architecture, the exhibition is divided into three distinct moments accompanied by texts developed by the architects Nuno Grande and Jorge Figueira and the geographer Álvaro Domingues.
Faced with the voracity of urban transformations that alter the city's landscape and the daily ways of life through addition (consumption, tourism, density, speed), the counterpoint of emptiness and a praise of absence is proposed.
Vertical Reclamation of Individual Space
2018 | Casa Garden - Orient Foundation | Macao, China.
Solo exhibition. Images by Ana Aragão Atelier.
A series of new drawings presented at the Fundação do Oriente in Macao represent a link between the European city and the Asian city.
A counterpoint between an architectural iconography of impactful scale and a more anonymous and generic urban reality. A reality that has grown so much that it no longer has any horizontal space to grow and has to develop vertically.
This exhibition was curated by João Ó.
Future Frames
2016 | Jofebar Headquartes | Oporto, Portugal.
Solo exhibition. Photography by Rui Manuel Vieira.
The pretext was to think about the future. The result: an impossible promenade through the ruins of the present. More than the tempting fantastic vision of futuristic style, Via Utopia is a megalomaniac view of a schizophrenic present in permanent uncritical accumulation, and the realisation of the impossibility of the processing of this profusion of information by contemporary man.
This exhibition was commissioned and hosted by Jofebar.
