Founded in 1958, the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra (CAPC) is an entity of the Coimbra Academy – with artistic and administrative autonomy – and a non-profit cultural association recognised as being of cultural interest by the Portuguese state. Its aim is to raise public awareness and captivate public attention for contemporary art and culture. Its core objectives are the promotion and diffusion of the visual arts, gaining audiences for contemporary art; provision of a broad knowledge of contemporary artistic perspectives, their components and narratives, fostering a taste for enjoyment of art; and the promotion of contemporary art exhibitions and multidisciplinary cultural activities.
The building which serves as headquarters of the institution is located in city rental townhouses dating back to the 1930s, situated on the lower level of Escadas Monumentais. The Sede building was a founding venue to experimenting and to the various ways of being which characterize the fifty years of CAPC. Originally imagined as residency to a bourgeois family, this building transformed — to significant names of Portuguese Contemporary Art such as Túlia Saldanha, Armando Azevedo, Ernesto de Sousa, João Dixo, Alberto Carneiro, Ângelo de Sousa, Julião Sarmento, João Vieira, Michael Biberstein, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Pedro Portugal, Pedro Proença, Xana, Rui Chafes, Paulo Mendes, João Tabarra, Rui Serra, António Olaio, Sebastião Resende, Miguel Palma, Wolf Vostell and Robert Filliou — into a lab of expressive practices, a space of enormous conceptual openness, favourable to reflection and artistic activism. Here, ways of artistic realization from different cultural times took shape, such as late Modernism or Postmodernism, ways of artistic production that carried the desire for emancipation, for overcoming history, for tradition, for conventions, critical and interrogative impulses about the western artistic regime. All of these elements asserted themselves and became more pronounced through the temporality of the CAPC’s headquarters, deepening the identity between the domestic architecture of Rua Castro Matoso and the historical experience.
