Portas Vilaseca
A New Archive
Based in Rio de Janeiro since 2010, Portas Vilaseca is an established presence in the contemporary art scene of both the city and the country. The gallery regularly participates in national and international art fairs and represents around twenty artists. As the gallery approached its fifteenth anniversary, uint studio created a new website that would present its digital presence in a more contemporary way while also incorporating the extensive archive of news, exhibitions, fairs, and publications already available on the previous website. The project therefore involved building a new platform that reorganizes the institution's digital history.
Development began from a substantial pre-existing body of content. News articles, past exhibitions, artist pages, fairs, and other institutional materials were migrated, reorganized, and connected within a new database. The new system architecture made it possible to create relationships between these materials. From a news article, for example, visitors can continue navigating through the artists, exhibitions, and fairs mentioned in that piece. In this way, each visit becomes an invitation to keep exploring the labyrinth of content that forms the institution's history. The website is bilingual, available in Portuguese and English.
Unique Design and Interface
The website's design was created exclusively for the gallery. Starting from a series of prototypes, the visual system was developed around the geometry of the logo created by Peu Mello, which was further elaborated through animated motion design.
Relational Content
Each represented artist has a dedicated page featuring biography, artworks, exhibitions, fairs, publications, news, and external links. Artwork pages include technical information, expandable images, and inquiry tools via WhatsApp, email, or direct links. This structure serves different audiences, including collectors, curators, researchers, journalists, and general visitors.
News can be filtered by year and artist. Exhibitions can be browsed by period. Artist, artwork, fair, publication, and news pages are connected programmatically, reducing manual work for the gallery's team and facilitating navigation through the archive.
Homepage: A Point of Entry
On the homepage, an editorial carousel highlights content selected by the gallery. These featured items are generally news pieces that deserve greater visibility each week.
The homepage also includes a dynamic selection of works from the gallery's collection that is automatically renewed with every visit. By displaying a different random selection each time the page loads, the website offers a glimpse into the diversity of the artists represented by the gallery.
Content Management Agility
The platform was built to support continuous updates by the gallery team through a fully customized CMS designed to simplify content management. The system includes dedicated fields for each type of entry—artist, artwork, exhibition, news article, fair, and publication—and also makes it possible to establish relationships between them. When registering a new exhibition, for example, it can be linked to artists, artworks, news articles, and fairs that already exist in the database. This makes the updating process more fluid and integrated.
The project resulted in a robust institutional platform prepared for consultation, continuous updates, and the international circulation of information about the gallery and its artists.