A First Look Inside the New MACAM Museum in Lisbon

Art from Martins collection is everywhere at MACAM – in the rooms, the lobbies, the gardens. But 2,000 m2 is given over to formal exhibition space and is accessible to the public as well as hotel guests. In the old palace are large galleries, on either side of the entrance lobby, for permanent exhibitions. One side contains a significant showing of Portuguese painting from the late 19^th century to the 1970s, on the other a range of works from Martins’ international contemporary collection. Among these are a triptych by John Baldessari from 1981 – an updated Vanitas for modern times – and a fabulous animation by Pedro Reyes from 2011 in which Karl Marx and Adam Smith squabble over politics with a background of Occupy Wall Street. Elsewhere are works by big names like Carol Bove, Albert Oehlen and Ernesto Neto. In a temporary exhibition, in a new building reached across a large internal garden, that is focussed on the Anthropocene, is an astonishing sculpture by the Belgian Belinda de Bruckyere of two intertwined taxidermied horses that is both compelling and repellent. Martins choices are often bold and interesting and not always for the faint-hearted.

“I started collecting 51 years ago, when Portugal wasn’t connected to the international scene, so I focussed on historic work from where I lived,” explains Martins. As a result, he has some major pieces, including the most important collection of work by Eduardo Viana – a Portuguese artist who studied with Robert and Sonia Delaunay – in private hands. “His painting A Mulher da Laranja [The Woman with the Orange, 1913] is one of my favourites,” says Martins. “It’s not the most valuable, but it’s a piece with which I have a special relationship. It reminds me of when I first came to Lisbon, and the twilight hours in the city.” A 1968 abstract work by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, called Maio de 68 (May 1968) which is now hanging at MACAM has been loaned to many international exhibitions over the years.

In 2002, Martins attended his first art fairs, ARCO in Madrid and then Art Basel in Switzerland, and began to forge connections with contemporary dealers. He started looking closely into artists’ work, visiting their studios and studying catalogues. Now, to celebrate the opening of the hotel, he has commissioned impressive new sculptures from the Canadian Angela Bulloch and the Portuguese Jose Pedro Croft which are installed on terraces accessible to those in the finest rooms in the old palace. A series of new moving image and sculptural wall works by the Spanish Carlos Aires make for surprising interventions in the old Chapel.

Those staying at the hotel can choose rooms in the old palace, where the very grandest have decorated ceilings and Portuguese tiling from days gone by. There are also studios, with small kitchens. Martins likes studio number 6 the best—actually a multi-roomed apartment with two terraces—and has named it The Collector. In it hangs a bright work by the well-known Portuguese artist Jose de Guimaroes, who also designed the logo for the Portuguese tourist board.

The architects MetroUrbe were charged with both the restoration of the old building and the addition of the new wing. Here, in May, a swimming pool will be completed on the roof, available only to hotel guests, and offering views over the nearby river Targes and the surrounding neighbourhoods of Alcantara and Belem. A number of the new rooms – decorated in a neutral palette with warm oak floors and crisp cream bedlinens – have large balconies overlooking the central sculpture-filled garden (they include a more than life-size white deer by Miguel Branco from 2016, and an explosion of silvery metal by Pablo Cabrita Reis from 204) while the building’s long façade is also an artwork, of white three-dimensional tiles designed by Portuguese ceramist Maria Ana Vasco Costa. At MACAM, the art is quite literally everywhere.