Serralves presents ‘Affliction of Spirit. The Duerckheim Collection x Serralves’

‘Affliction of Spirit. The Duerckheim Collection x Serralves’ opens at Serralves

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto opens its exhibition “Affliction of Spirit. The Duerckheim Collection x Serralves” to the public this Friday, presenting for the first time the collection whose core group of works was placed on deposit at the institution in 2024.

Curated by the museum’s deputy director, Marta Moreira de Almeida, in collaboration with collector Count Duerckheim, the exhibition aims to place its artworks within both their historical and political contexts, as well as the context of the time in which the show is being staged, the curator told journalists in April.

“The collector’s intention is to spark that debate about historical duty, since the end of the Second World War,” the museum’s deputy director said at the time, noting that around half of the displayed works belong to the group deposited at Serralves.

The exhibition brings together works by artists including Damien Hirst, Zhang Huan, Anselm Kiefer, Hermann Nitsch and Gerhard Richter, among many others.

Damien Hirst opens the exhibition

“Affliction of Spirit”, a title taken from a biblical text, begins with two works by Hirst in a “reflection on the cycle of life”. One is a 2011 piece comprising “a bull immersed in formaldehyde, in two display cases, which the public will be able to walk through and see the animal’s entrails”.

In 2024, the Serralves Foundation announced that part of the Duerckheim collection would be deposited with the Porto-based institution, in an arrangement brokered by Portuguese intermediary Nuno Luzio.

The Duerckheim collection and Nuno Luzio’s role

Speaking to Lusa at the time, Luzio said his motivation for acting between the Duerckheim family and Serralves was “a patriotic duty and right”, “with no nationalist pretension”.

“I have been away for more than 20 years, I still follow the news from my country every day and I am an engaged citizen, so I felt it was a patriotic duty and right to try to bring this major contemporary art collection to Portugal,” he told Lusa.

Born in 1944 in the German region of Saxony, industrialist Christian Duerckheim lived in London during the 1960s and became one of Europe’s “most significant collectors”, as British newspaper The Guardian wrote in 2013, when he donated 34 drawings by modern German artists and a further 60 works to the British Museum.

Christian Duerckheim’s collecting history

In 2011, Duerckheim sold around 80 works through auction house Sotheby’s for a record sum of more than £100 million, according to reports published at the time by the specialist press.

Christian Duerckheim told The New York Times then that he had always wanted to see the art of his own era. Interested in history, he became obsessed with the art of his country after seeing a work by Georg Baselitz in 1970.