FLAD launches the Flechada program, which aims to support artists between the ages of 24 and 31 in the start of their career, funding up to 5 scholarships with a maximum of 10 thousand euros each so that they can organize their first solo exhibition. Applications for this program are open until January 25, 2024.

Flechada – Support Program for First Solo Exhibitions 2024 was born from an identified need to support young artists in their first solo exhibition, a moment considered crucial for their launch as professional artists.

One of the greatest obstacles to professionalization and visibility in contemporary art circuits is the difficulty in showing artistic work as a coherent and defensible proposal by the artist, without the constraints of institutionalized circuits and without an a priori evaluation of curatorships governed by generational or rigidly programmatic conceptual limits.

This new support from FLAD aims to overcome these obstacles and make room for the new, the one – style, genre, discourse, object – which, perhaps, does not yet have a name. It is often from the first structured solo exhibition that one enters the art scene, including the art markets, that one begins to have institutional proposals, and therefore, to be able to maintain the fixed costs implied in practice.

The support for an exhibition project and articulation with professional structures and cultural agents will allow the selected artists to develop a unique, individual exhibition project, opening paths and developing the plastic and visual body with agility.

This program is open to artists of Portuguese nationality or resident in Portugal for at least 5 years, who have not yet held any solo exhibition and aged between 24 and 31 years of age on the closing date of applications.

Applications are open between 27 November 2023 and 25 January 2024 and must be submitted here. The results will be announced by the end of February 2024.

To learn more about this program, see the Flechada Notice of Call.

For more information, please contact: luz.fernandes@flad.pt.