Francisco Tropa. Miss America

In conjunction with ART CITY Bologna 2026, the Banca di Bologna Hall at Palazzo De' Toschi will be housing Miss America, an exhibition by Portuguese artist Francisco Tropa (b. 1968). Curated by Simone Menegoi, it is Tropa's first large-scale solo show in Italy since Scenario, his project for the Portugal Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The exhibition takes its title from its main work: Miss America, a new creation that combines installation and performance.

Francisco Tropa is one of the most important Portuguese artists to have risen to international prominence in the last thirty years. He has presented a long series of solo exhibitions in European institutions, participated in some of the world's major periodic art exhibitions (São Paulo Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Manifesta, etc.) and been invited twice to the Venice Biennale. Over the course of nearly three decades, he has created installations, sculptures, drawings, performances, photographs, and films that range between the rarefaction of conceptual language and the allure of materials such as bronze, wood, and glass. Layered and complex, his work is dense with references to art history, archaeology, and literature. Overall, it presents itself primarily as a reflection on the nature of what we call "art": its origin, its history, and its connection to other fields of human activity.

One of Tropa's distinctive traits is his tendency to create cycles of works that can span years, or even decades, and that are sometimes intertwined. They include Giant, in which the bones of the human skeleton, reproduced in bronze, serve as the starting point for sculptures that trace the origins of architecture back to the body and death; Scripta, inspired by an ancient Roman board game and based on the affinity between aesthetic and playful activity; and Lanterns, light projections in which, as in Plato's allegory of the cave, everyday objects give rise to phantasmagorias of moving light and shadow.
One of these lantern works, which also introduced Tropa to the Italian public at the 2011 Venice Biennale, opens the exhibition. Titled Lantern with clock mechanism (2025), it casts the large-scale shadow of a working clockwork mechanism. As always in the works from this series, the projector is not a mere technical object: designed by the artist and made of brass, it is a full-fledged sculpture.
If the exhibition opens with shadow, it closes with a cloud. Fumeux fume (2018-2025) is a smoker similar to the ones used in beekeeping; thanks to a timed device, it emits puffs of steam at regular intervals.
The passage of time and the dissolving vapor are figures of transience. As such, they hark back to a seventeenth-century pictorial genre that is very dear to the artist: the vanitas, a still life whose elements remind the viewers of the impermanence of things.

Between the extremes of these two works, the viewer will encounter Miss America, a new production that will occupy almost the entire Banca di Bologna Hall at Palazzo de' Toschi, and which marks the beginning of a new cycle of works for Tropa. The precise content of the piece will be revealed only at the opening. What the artist wishes to share for now is that it will combine installation and performance; it will be set up and dismantled cyclically before the viewers' eyes; and it will include a text. As for the title, Miss America, it is intentionally ambiguous. Tropa reminds us that it can be interpreted in at least two ways: as an obvious reference to the obsolete ritual of the beauty pageant, or—if "Miss" is read as a form of the verb "to miss"—in the sense of "I miss, we miss, America." And our thoughts, then, turn to current events.

Thanks to Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris.

Francisco Tropa was born in 1968 in Lisbon, where he lives today. In addition to participating twice in the Venice Biennale (in 2003, in the international exhibition, and in 2011, as a representative of Portugal), he has taken part in the Rennes Biennale (2012), the Istanbul Biennale (2011), Manifesta (2000), the Melbourne Biennale (1999) and the São Paulo Biennale (1998). His solo exhibitions of the last decade have included: Paésine, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, 2024; ⒶMO-TE, Museu Serralves, Porto, 2024; Le Poumon et le Coeur, Musée d'art moderne de Paris, 2022; Che Vuoi?, Le Creux de l'Enfer, Thiers, FR, 2022; The Pyrgus from Chaves, Fundaçào Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 2019; Scripta (performance), Centre National de la Danse, Paris, 2018; Gigante (performance), Festival MOVE, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2018; TSAE - Trésors Submergés de l'Ancienne Égypte, Musée Régional d'Art Contemporain Languedoc - Roussillon, Sérignan, FR, 2015; TSAE - Tesouros Submersos do Antigo Egipto, Museu de Lisboa, 2014; STAE - Submerged Treasures of Ancient Egypt, La Verrière, Fondation d'Entreprise Hermès, Brussels, 2013.