Pedro Cabrita Reis is one of Portugal's most internationally renowned artists, with numerous works featured in European museums.

Discovered in the 1980s, his work quickly expanded from painting (both abstract and figurative) to sculpture and installation, always taking into account the architectural or urban spaces in which it is displayed.

His creative process is omnivorous in its desire to recover/integrate the signs of urban or rural life, whether they come from ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture. Using debris, discarded fragments, and banal and anonymous objects associated in unexpected and effective ways, his goal is to magnify, through grand gestures of discursive imposition, signs of what could be seen as a civilisational decline.

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 sculpture and courtly painting (whose masters he often cites) to a fascination with the small-scale collecting of Wunderkammer or Cabinets de Curiosités.

In MAAT’s Oval Gallery, Cabrita Reis presents a vast collection of series of paintings, drawings, and sculptures, created specifically for this exhibition. Comprising nearly two hundred previously unseen works, this exhibition consolidates the artist's investigations and deepens his connection with the great themes and masters of post-Renaissance art.

*The title Pedro Cabrita Reis: “without sorrow of heart” originates from a passage in Hesiod, Works and Days, devoted to the “Golden Age”, a primordial era when humankind lived “like gods”, without suffering, fatigue, or worry.