Pedro Cabrita Reis: without sorrow of heart

Pedro Cabrita Reis: without sorrow of heart is the first solo exhibition at MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology by one of Portugal’s most internationally renowned artists. It comprises around two hundred previously unseen works by Cabrita Reis, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and collages, produced between 2025 and 2026 specifically for this exhibition, part of the 10th-anniversary programme of MAAT.

The exhibition consolidates the artist’s investigations and deepens his engagement with major themes and masters of art, with strong references to the tradition of Western painting, from the Renaissance to modernism, and more broadly to Western culture.

The series and individual works provide Cabrita Reis with a means of further exploring his enduring concerns: architecture and its ruin, nature (understood as scenography or landscape), and history approached through fascination and subversion, as described by the exhibition curator, João Pinharanda.

The principal themes focus on major dramatic biblical episodes. In Ecce Homo (2025), depicting the presentation of Jesus to the crowd, the artist places himself in the role of Christ. In Adam and Eve (revised) (2026), Cabrita Reis revisits the symbolic reading that links the protagonists of Humanity’s fall to its Saviour.

“Each of these paintings, each series, serves to acknowledge and affirm a culture and a history, a temporality through which the artist wishes to claim an active sense of belonging. The obsessive manner in which he approaches and deviates from the canon is driven by a defiance of ease, yet realised in joy, ‘without sorrow of heart’, as the artist puts it. And therein lies the key to the title of an exhibition where weight and intensity, seemingly predominant, primarily express a sustained work programme driven by international ambition,” João Pinharanda notes.

About Pedro Cabrita Reis
 Widely recognised as one of the major figures of European contemporary art, Pedro Cabrita Reis (1956,Lisbon) has built, since the mid-1980s, a body of work decisive to the renewal of contemporary sculpture, developing a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, photography and installation. Today, Cabrita Reis remains one of the most influential and consistent figures in the contemporary art of recent decades. 

While he is internationally known for his sculptures and installations, painting remains a foundational, enduring territory within his practice, running consistently through more than five decades of production. The theoretical and formal complexity of his work rests on an anthropological reflection that privileges interrogation over narrative or ideological assertion. His works are built on silences, fragments and elemental gestures, sustaining an ongoing dialogue between individual and collective memory, between culture and experience.

Over the course of his career, he has taken part in some of the most significant international exhibitions of contemporary art, among them Documenta IX (1992) and Documenta 14 (2017) in Kassel; the São Paulo Biennial (1994 and 1998); the Aperto at the Venice Biennale (1997); and the Lyon Biennale (2009). In 2003, he represented Portugal at the 50th Venice Biennale with Longer Journeys, returning in 2013 with A Remote Whisper and, in 2022, with Field, presented at the Chiesa di San Fantin. That same year, he inaugurated Les Trois Grâces in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, a project by the Musée du Louvre.

In 2024, he presented Atelier, the most comprehensive retrospective of his career, bringing together some 1,500 works produced over 50 years. In 2026, he returns to Venice with XIV Steps (until November 22), a series of fourteen paintings inspired by the Stations of the Cross which, marking a new stage in his artistic investigation, once again affirms the continuity of painting as an essential dimension of his work.