Jenny Holzer at the Serralves Foundation in Porto
Wrong Answers, the first solo exhibition of American artist Jenny Holzer in Portugal, opens within the sprawling garden-exhibition space of Porto’s Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Fundação de Serralves). In the midst of the American political moment, where the airwaves are replete with references to President Donald Trump, Holzer adapts her decades-long visual language to address these divisive and peculiar times.
The site-specific retrospective collects the works, mediums, and techniques that have defined Holzer’s oeuvre. There are spinning LED works, poetic self-devised slogans, and messages carved in stone. Her work has continually adapted, both in media and message, to the times in which she has lived while also revealing the story of the artist herself.
Installation Views of Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers | all photos © Serralves Foundation
messages to the Trump administration
Opening the Serralves show is Holzer’s READY FOR YOU (2023–25), a golden canvas turned upside down. Caught at just the right angle, the gleam gives way to reveal the hand-scrawled message ‘THEY ARE READY FOR YOU WHEN YOU ARE,’ framed by a very fine, inconspicuous printing of the White House’s letterhead. It references the note President Trump received during the riots that occurred on January 6th. The gold leafing recalls his interior tastes, which have seeped into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during his time in office. Turned upside down, it recalls the gesture of inverting the American flag, one that signals grave danger to those who can see it.
The next room over opens up to a saturated tiling of the artist’s paper-and-text work, Inflammatory Essays (1979–82). Living in New York in the 70s and 80s, Holzer was surrounded by the paper poster, a powerful messaging tool that colored the city’s surfaces. Inspired by the rhythm and syntax of manifestos, the artist developed pithy, one-hundred-word essays. Through careful writing, editing, and rewriting, she transforms the words into a visual object. In a later part of Wrong Answers, Holzer’s early drafts with her handwritten edits are displayed alongside the ephemera that has emerged from her art practice.
inflammatory essays and truisms
In Serralves’s display of Inflammatory Essays, the works are precisely placed from floor to ceiling in alternating diagonal lines of shockingly bright colors. Her words are equally striking. In an all-caps serif font that reads like a newspaper headline, the piece rattles off statements like, ‘CHANGE IS THE BASIS OF ALL HISTORY, THE PROOF OF VIGOR.’ and ‘THE RECKONING WILL BE HASTENED BY THE STAGING OF SEED DISTURBANCES.’ On the occasion of the Porto exhibition, the texts have also been translated into Portuguese. In a sense, this deceptively simple vehicle for her artistic language most adeptly encapsulates the artist’s prolific relationship with the aestheticization of the written word.
As these messages swirl forward, the rainbow gives way to the stark white work of Truisms (1977–79). Here, single-sentence declarations appear on rectangular sheets that look almost like scrolls, diplomas, or other forms of official documents. Atop this tessellation of words is the giant portrait of a face that nearly fills the entire wall and bears a striking resemblance to the 45th and 47th president of the United States. Prompting AI first with ‘enraged orator,’ she added other qualities in Gemini and ChatGPT until the face came to look like Trump.