Pedro Cabrita Reis

Pedro Cabrita Reis was born in 1956 in Lisbon, the city where he currently lives and works. His work has steadily received international acknowledgement, thus becoming crucial and decisive for the understanding of sculpture from the mid-1980’s onwards. His complex work can be characterized by an idiosyncratic philosophical and poetical discourse embracing a great variety of means: 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, 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 reach a metaphorical dimension by going beyond the visual.

The complex theoretical and formal diversity of the work of Cabrita Reis proceeds from an anthropological reflection, which is contrary to the reductionism of sociological discourse. In fact, it is on silences and indagations that the work of Cabrita is based and built on.

Pedro Cabrita Reis participated in important international exhibitions, such as Documenta IX and XIV in Kassel in 1992 and 2017, the 21th and 24th São Paulo Biennales, respectively in 1994 and 1998, in the Aperto of the Venice Biennale in 1997. In 2003, he represented Portugal in the Venice Biennale, in 2013 he presented “A Remote Whisper”, 55^th Biennale de Venezia and participated in the Xème Biennale de Lyon, “The Spectacle of the Everyday”, Lyon, 2009. In 2022 Cabrita presented in the Tuileries “The Three Graces” commissioned by the Louvre Museum, and on the occasion of the 59^th Venice Biennale Cabrita Reis presented “Field” at Chiesa di San Fantin.