Pedro Cabrita Reis

Pedro Cabrita Reis was born in Lisbon, in 1956, and graduated in painting from the old ESBAL [Lisbon Superior School of Fine Arts]. Most relevant in his international career are his participations at the IX and XIV Kassel Documenta, in 1992 and 2017, respectively, and at the 21st and 24^th São Paulo Biennale, in 1994 and 1998. Invited by Germano Celant, he integrated the Aperto exhibition, in 1997, and he represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale in 2003. Major exhibitions: “Sometimes one can see the clouds passing by”, Kunsthalle Bern, 2004; “Pedro Cabrita Reis” MACRO – Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, in 2006; “Pedro Cabrita Reis”, Fundazione Merz, Turin, 2008, and the retrospective exhibition of his work, successively, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, at the Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, Museum Leuven and Museu Coleção Berardo. The Carmona e Costa Foundation held the retrospective exhibition of his drawing work, in 2011.

From 1980 onwards, his work shows the codes of painting and drawing as the basis of a practice that fuses borders between artistic expressions, when classically considered. Through the rereading of the legacy of the vanguards, specially the Russian constructivism and suprematism, the political dimension reconciles with an individual and poetic reflection on the human condition, emphasizing the need to see things “within” and “from within”. The “gaze” accommodates the symbolic charge of the materials used, and a very significant part of his works inhabits the tension between monumentality and the deliberate erasure of this status. If the objects result from a living experience in which praxis and thought are mutually determined, landscape, time, memory, and forgetfulness are activated through a process where metaphor and melancholy become the two poles of apprehension and knowledge of the world.

JCP, October 2020