Treger Saint Silvestre art collection

02/09/2026

01/09/2026

Happy Rentrée 📝

"Back to School" with the latest addition to the collection
This drawing by Edmund Monsiel regarded as one of the most important of the European Outsider Artists.

Edmund Monsiel, a Polish shopkeeper with untreated schizophrenia, started drawing during World War II. When German forces took over his shop, he feared arrest and fled to his brother’s house, where he passed the remainder of the war hiding in a dark attic. Under these conditions, by the light of a candle, Monsiel started to draw his highly detailed pencil works. After the end of the war, he continued to live in isolation, taking a job as a machine operator. He was a quiet and devout man who feared the forces of evil. Much of his work is dominated by religious imagery, with representations of priests, God, Christ or the Devil. His intricate, highly detailed line drawings are frequently dominated by moustached faces, in full face and in profile, often reproduced in multiples within larger forms, the background of his pictures made up of hundreds of pairs of staring eyes. The overall effect is overwhelming, particularly given the scale of the drawings (average size 15 x 10 cm) such that the composition threatens to be lost in the elaborate chaos of detail. Monsiel produced hundreds of pieces of artwork in a 20-year period. Although many were lost, over 550 drawings and sketches remain intact.

Edmund Monsiel (Poland, 1897 - 1962)
Untitled, 1950 | Graphite on paper, 15,5 x 10 cm

27/08/2026

“In the beginning were the eyes; then came the rest.
Once upon a time there were two eyes—this is how part of the history of art brut begins.
In these art-brut bodies, in these wide or elongated art-brut heads, the eyes are also the beginning of the story. Once upon a time there were some eyes, and then the rest appeared.
The rest includes the long legs that are not legs but stakes, things that look like foundations allowing the human face to be up there, in a tower.
The brut human: what is it? It is a being that walks and sees. It has legs and eyes, and the rest is what allows it to stay alive and reproduce. Belly, sexual organs, intestines, heart, lungs. Yes, all of this: the human needs to eat and breathe, of course, but only in order to walk and see. The centre of the body is an appendix, a simple means.”

Excerpt from the essay by Gonçalo M. Tavares, written especially for the exhibition HORROR VACUI, situates the heavy, handcrafted, dusty, time-worn sculptures on view within a precise meta-narrative. Presented as a sound piece, it resonates throughout the exhibition spaces and accompanies visitors along their journey.

Curated by Marta Jecu, this group show is on display at Centro de Arte Oliva, presenting eighty-five anthropomorphic figures from our collection

Installation views
📷 ©️Dinis Santos

25/08/2026

The practice of Fernando Marques Penteado is supported by a very well-defined method that involves long processes and specific techniques that are tenaciously operated. The artist has a work trajectory specially marked by embroidery, which ends up linking clothing accessories, books, and found objects. And for an aesthetic choice, it combines autobiographical and historical matter in the link of inventive literary creations. 

Starting with in-depth research on the contribution of the textile universe to visual culture and the diffusion of knowledge, the artist elaborates narratives permeated by his own personal vocabulary, whose profoundness is articulated by playful undertones that constantly negotiate the meaning of things. In representations sewn by Fernando Marques Penteado, we are faced with common human relations and historical and semantic displacements. It is within these that topics such as sexuality, homoeroticism, gender, and violence are considered from a perspective that articulates, in a very particular way, social critiques from domestic environments. 

Fernando Marques Penteado (Brazil, 1955)

Jean Nguyen, 2023 | Racket, cotton and linen thread, ballpoint pen, PVC and hand embroidery, 69 x 23,5 cm
📷 © DR

19/08/2026

For the last decade our collection has been incorporated more and more works related with photography, like shots, prints, photomontages and photo collages created by self-taught artists.

To celebrate World Photography Day the only one Lee Godie (USA, 1908 - 1994). A Chicago native, Godie had married and raised a family, but in 1968, following the deaths of two of her children, she took to the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago and reinvented herself as an artist. Making the streets of downtown her studio, she lived outdoors and in transient hotels, sold her art in person, and used public lockers to store her supplies. Godie was a colorful and dynamic figure in the city’s cultural scene into the early 1990s, becoming arguably Chicago’s most collected artist.

Associating her creative identity with the Art Institute, which boasts one of the world’s strongest collections of late nineteenth-century French art, Godie aimed to become a modern-day impressionist. The high premium placed on visual pleasure in impressionist works helped convince her that beauty was of the utmost importance in art. Playing the flâneuse in Chicago’s downtown loop, she evoked a world of elegance in her images that was remote from her lived experience. Godie painted likenesses of society types and still lifes of birds and plants. She also took several hundred self-portraits in photo booths at the Greyhound bus station, which she embellished by hand and sometimes attached to her canvases. Her artistic activity extended beyond creating discrete images to transforming the process of selling them into a ritual. Godie valued interacting with her clients and deciding whether they deserved to own her work and, if so, how much they should pay.
Performance wove through every aspect of Godie’s art.
Source: Kara Fiedorek

Lee Godie,
Untitled (“Cameo Pins and painting”), c.1980 | Ink on Photobooth black and white unique photograph, 12,1 x 9,5 cm

18/08/2026

HORROR VACUI brings eighty-five anthropomorphic figures from our collection — animals, machines, spirits, humans, monsters, and angels — open up a tumultuous field in which anarchy and excess act as protective mechanisms against ontological uncertainty.
Curated by Marta Jecu this exhibition seeks to capture not only how conventions can be defied, but also the humour of inhabiting space and oneself with excess, freedom, and restlessness.
On display at Centro de Arte Oliva

Mathias Robert and Nathalie Lété are a French duo renowned for their cardboard paintings and expressionist sculptures whose work is part of the group show

Mathias et Nathalie (France, 1966, 1964)
il à Coudre Qualité Supérieure, 1993, Gouache and ribbon on cardboard, 76,5 x 31,5 x 28 cm

14/08/2026

Discover the exhibition SAGRADO CORAÇÃO on display at Fundação Eugénio de Almeida

Curated by Joaquim Oliveira Caetano, the exhibition brings works from the collections of churches in the Archdiocese of Évora, and a set of contemporary works from our collection

“The hagiography found in Sacred Heart illustrates all of this in the tears of the saints, in the expression of a life force stifled by arrows, in the drawings of artists committed to psychiatric institutions, in the blessings of the angels, in the prostration of the martyrs, and so on. The dialogues between the Treger Saint Silvestre Collection and the collection of the Archdiocese of Évora bridge and bring together different time periods.”

Make sure to visit this summer, definitely a must-see!

Tuesday to Sunday,
10 am - 1 pm / 2 - 7 pm

Free admission

Exhibition views
📷©️ Tomás Silva

12/08/2026

Ken Grimes (United States of America, 1947)
Untitled (since Epsilon Eridani is only 800 million years old...), 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 88.9 x 88.9 cm
For todays

Working almost exclusively with black and white acrylic paint on canvases or hardboard, Ken Grimes explores esoteric and scientific data he gathers from his readings on ufology and science fiction. His works thus appear as the product of his reflections and interpretations of messages received from extraterrestrial intelligence.
His paintings oscillate between fantasy and austerity but are often both at once: infinite variations on the conceptual theme of extraterrestrial intelligence. They serve as a window to a world where flying saucers, UFOs, crop circles, radio telescopes, and interstellar signals are integral to reality.
Grimes’ personal mythology is a pastiche of his autobiography, imagery from outer space, and carefully selected references to pop culture, science fiction, and astronomy. In some of his works, all figurative elements are abandoned in favor of more or less accessible textual messages.
In her most recent works on paper, originally conceived as preliminary pieces for larger compositions but later developed as independent works, Grimes intertwines excerpts from her favorite writers. It is possible to find passages from Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, which are woven into the artist’s own narrative voice. His works bear witness to the ongoing thought process that occupies his mind.

For today's total solar eclipse 🌒

10/08/2026

Blalla W. Hallmann (Wolfgang Ewald Hallmann) developed his drawing skills during adolescence. His works establish a balanced relationship between childlike imagery, fantastic creatures, torture chambers, morgues, and parodic references to art history. Hallmann is regarded as an exceptional figure within the context of post-war German art.
His practice is marked by an intense engagement with his historical moment: impasto paintings depicting mythical landscapes stand alongside scenes portraying liminal psychological experiences, giving form to the individual’s isolation in a world permeated by suspicion and envy. German history, the omnipotence of Church and State, child abuse and the oppression of children, human exploitation, malice, and violence are among the central themes of his work.

On view at Centro de Arte Oliva as part of the group show HORROR VACUI.
Curated by Marta Jecu, the exhibition seeks to capture not only how conventions can be defied, but also the humour of inhabiting space and oneself with excess, freedom, and restlessness. These anthropomorphic sculptures seem deeply anti-modern as they open up a territory that stands in opposition to modern valorisations of abstraction, silence, spatiality, synthesis, and containment, affirming confusion, irrational accumulation, oscillation, and vehemence. They reinforce and dismantle the principles of contemporary art, transgressing convention and extending limits.

Blalla W. Hallmann (Poland, 1941 – Germany, 1997)
"Sometimes I think, I am knocking at heavens door"(Schweinchenaltar), 1984, Wood, acrylic and papier-mâché,
120 x 63 x 83 cm



📷 © Dinis Santos