Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers

At Serralves in Porto, Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers follows the American artist’s use of language across streets, buildings, stone, paper, painting, and electronic signs. It is her first solo exhibition in Portugal, tracing a practice that began with the sharp public address of Truisms and Inflammatory Essays before moving into benches, sarcophagi, LED works, redacted documents, bones, and broken sculptural forms.

The exhibition looks at what happens when words gain force, lose meaning, or get deliberately erased. Jenny Holzer’s emphatic capitals once slipped into the visual language of advertising and authority, carrying messages about war, grief, power, and survival into public space. At Serralves, that tension becomes the central thread, with works that move between liberated speech and censorship, asking how language can protect, expose, distort, or disappear.