Pedro Cabrita Reis
The London Angles

exhibition 16 oct - 6 dec

Sprovieri is delighted to announce ‘The London Angles’ the inaugural exhibition with the gallery by Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis. Cabrita Reis’ complex work can be characterised 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. Focused on questions relative to space and memory, his work is based and built on investigations and silences.

‘With a certain frequency Pedro Cabrita Reis' work expounds a discourse on space tied to reflection. The compositions form a precious balancing act between light and matter. Many of the exhibited pieces display a relationship with the concept of windows which in the work of the Portuguese artist is amplified, not merely by the Renaissance structure of the frame/window itself – a technique ready to open new abstract perspectives on the concept of space – but in that particular use of materials tied to the construction of a window.

The equilibrium between light and matter is expressed in the balance between architecture and image and "creates a reality in its own right, instead of reproducing it" (Pedro Cabrita Reis).

The concept of windows creates a direct relation between image and environment in a mechanism that employs the basic structures of the surrounding architecture. On the one hand, through the technical potentiality established in the making of the work, and on the other, carrying out a direct association with the light. The neon lights are an integral element of the work using the sources of light originating from the work itself. The light glows from the work and spreads into its surroundings. It is a relationship that plays on the contraposition between a geometrical shaped composition and the burst of light generated from it, causing both strengths and tensions. In this series of works, the dialogue shape-light conveys a third key condition which is put in motion through the reflection of the glass often included in the composition. Its presence due to the use of light creates several reflections in dialogue within the environment.

Cabrita Reis’ work translates painting into architecture, sculpture into space and finds abstraction inside a grammar of figurative materials. All the materials are elements that refer to our everyday experience, from the architectural space around us to the energy of human activities, and become a work in progress. His compositions are determined by dynamics of potentiality. The ingredients and compositions of the works are structured in order to emanate energy, which is in dialogue with the surrounding people and spaces. The works seem to absorb the surrounding space, even when they are of smaller size’ (Text by Lorenzo Benedetti).

About the artist

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 1980s onwards. He participated in important international exhibitions: the 55th Venice Biennale with the site-specific work 'A remote whisper' (2013), the 10th Biennale de Lyon, 'The Spectacle of the Everyday’ (2009), the 50th Venice Biennale where he represented Portugal (2003), the 'Aperto' of the Venice Biennale (1997), the 21st and 24th São Paulo Biennales (1994 and 1998) and Documenta IX in Kassel (1992).

He has exhibited extensively across the globe including the current exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto, Tate Modern, London (2013), Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon (2011), Museum for Contemporary Art, Leuven (2011), Carré d’Art, Nîmes (2010), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2009), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2009), Fondazione Merz, Torino (2008), Kunsthaus Graz (2008), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2006), Modern Art Center, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2006), Kunsthalle Bern (2004) and Camden Arts Centre, London (2004).