Pedro Cabrita Reis
Other
Wednesday 30 September · until 15 Feb
Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis presents a huge painting installation in the Oval Gallery of MAAT, accompanied by a vast and varied set of small-scale pieces, drawings, sculptures, assemblages and series of paintings.
Pedro Cabrita Reis is one of the most internationalised Portuguese artists, with numerous presences in European museums. Revealed in the 1980s, his work quickly expanded from the field of painting (indifferently abstract or figurative) to that of sculpture and installation, always taking into account the architectural or urban spaces in which it is inserted. His creative process is omnivorous in its will to recover/integrate the signs of urban or rural life, coming from 'high' or 'low' culture. From debris, rejected fragments, banal and anonymous objects combined in unexpected and effective ways, his aim is to magnify, through great gestures of discursive imposition, signs of what could be seen as a civilisational fall. Using and benefiting from all the resources guaranteed by the succession of revolutions of modernity, Cabrita Reis insists on the continuity and effectiveness of great pre-modern art, in an arc that takes him from the Renaissance to Romanticism, from an interest in great courtly sculpture and painting (whose masters he frequently cites) to a fascination with the small-scale collecting of Wunderkammer or Cabinets de Curiosités. In the Oval Gallery of MAAT Gallery, Cabrita Reis will present an enormous installation of painting and, on the descending route towards that totalising and enveloping space, will show a vast and varied set of small-scale pieces, suites of drawings, sculptures, assemblages and series of other paintings, floral, landscape, figurative. Wednesday to Monday, from 10h to 19h. Technical sheet: Curated by João Pinharanda.