Cabrita: A Roving Gaze

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents A Roving Gaze, a major exhibition of the internationally acclaimed artist Pedro Cabrita Reis (born 1956 in Lisbon, where he lives and works), whose work is marked by formal and conceptual plurality: while his idiosyncratic philosophical and poetic approach was first acknowledged as a major contribution to the understanding of sculpture from the mid-1980s onwards, his artistic practice spans a variety of media from painting to photography, from drawing to sculpture and print, from public works to site-specific commissions.

The use of a wide variety of extremely simple and ordinary materials (wood, glass, plastic, acrylic, rubber, plaster, metal, linen, canvas and felt), a constant dialogue with the history of art and the revoking of everyday life gestures and actions accentuate the powerful metaphoric momentum that mark the whole of Cabrita Reis’s creative output. Recurring games of light and shadow, or opacity and transparency, convey an intricate meditation on existence—life and death.

Cabrita is part of the history of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, which, in the very same year of its opening in 1999, hosted an exhibition of his work. A Roving Gaze marks the artist’s return to Serralves precisely 20 years later. Specifically conceived for the Museum’s spaces, a single, large-scale work with a very clear autobiographic quality will reflect the ever-present relationship between Cabrita’s artistic practice and his reflection on the role of museums. Far from any chronological concern, A Roving Gaze displays, on 100 aluminium structures created by the artist, a series of found objects which generate a total installation environment where the artist’s life and work intercept.

Exhibition concept: Pedro Cabrita Reis with Marta Moreira de Almeida, Serralves Deputy Director;