Pedro Cabrita Reis

Background

Pedro Reis was born in 1956 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Career

Pedro Cabrita Reis devoted his career fully to art. His work has steadily received the international acknowledgment, thus becoming crucial and decisive for the understanding of sculpture from the mid-1980s onwards. His complex work can be characterized by an idiosyncratic philosophical and poetical discourse embracing a great variety of mediums: painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, and installations composed of industrial and found materials and manufactured objects.

By using simple materials that are submitted to constructive processes, Pedro Cabrita Reis recycles almost anonymous reminiscences of primordial gestures and actions repeated in everyday life. Centered in questions relative to space and memory, his works gain a suggestive power of association which reaches a metaphorical dimension by going beyond the visual.

The complex work of Pedro Cabrita Reis includes a multiplicity of means, from drawings using graffiti and pastel, to large-scale painting and architectural dimensioned installations. The flux between the used materials nevertheless maintains each's own character. Sculptures become images; when attached to windows, monochromatic articulated paintings lead to architectural elements or develop sculptural qualities. Photographs which appear in the installations open never-ending spaces for memory and reflection. Nature appears in his work in an extremely filtered way, as a road to consciousness. The loss of nature as a reference idea is the engine of Cabrita Reis' work.

Pedro has participated in many Biennials international exhibitions, such as Documenta 12 in 2017, A Remote Whisper, collateral event of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, 10th Biennale de Lyon in 2009; 12th Sculpture Biennale of Carrara in 2006. In 2003, he represented Portugal in the 50th Venice Biennale. Among the past main shows were Documenta IX in Kassel in 1992; the 21st and 24th São Paulo Biennales, respectively in 1994 and 1998; and the Aperto section of the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997.

Among his solo shows were MAXXI in Rome in 2016; The Arts Club in Chicago in 2015; Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon in 2011; Pinacoteca Do Estado in São Paulo in 2010; Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2010; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City in 2009; Fondazione Merz in Turin in 2008, among others.

Cabrita Reis is present in the public collections, including Berardo Museum, Lisbon; CAC Contemporary Art Center, Málaga; Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm; Moderna Galerija Ljubljana; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; SMAK, Ghent. Pedro currently lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

Achievements

• Pedro Cabrita Reis is highly famous for his installations "Lisbon Gates", "I dreamt your house was a line", "The Moscow Piece", and "Unframed #3."

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Cabinet d’Amateur #2 (Stockholm version)

  • The Unnamed Word #1

  • Unframed #3

  • Limbo

  • Lisbon Gates

  • Cabinet d’Amateur #1

  • I dreamt your house was a line

  • Catalogue #1 (Rouge-Crestet)

  • The Moscow Piece

  • The White Room (About T. S. Eliot)

Views

Pedro Cabrita Reis adhered to the artistic traditions of Neo-Minimalism. The artist sees architecture as replacing it and understands it as a mental discipline or a “reality exercise” through which people measure themselves and the world.

References

• Pedro Cabrita Reis: One After Another, A Few Silent Steps
  2010
• Pedro Cabrita Reis: Tree of Light
  2012
• Pedro Cabrita Reis
  2004
• Pedro Cabrita Reis: A few drawings, a facade inside and a possible staircase.
  2015
• Pedro Cabrita Reis
  1992
• Pedro Cabrita Reis : Contra a Claridade
  1994
• Pedro Cabrita Reis: True Gardens
  2008
• Pedro Cabrita Reis
  1999
• Pedro Cabrita Reis: Giving Heed to Silence
  2001
• Pedro Cabrita Reis
  1993
• Pedro Cabrita Reis: London
  2006
• Pedro Cabrita Reis: The Silence Within
  2001