Pedro Proença

Pedro Proença was born in 1962. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon. A visual artist, writer, musician and typographer, he works in painting, drawing, illustration and installation.

His work moves away from the historical avant-gardes and from currents of social critique to take up, with humour and irony, references from classical art and Antiquity, such as vases and muscular torsos, in decorative friezes of complex structure and great lightness. He combines these references with elements of graffiti and comics and often uses fragile materials and minimal means, such as backdrop paper and Indian ink. Critics have stressed his encyclopaedic vocation, made of games of concealment and disguise, and a latent melancholy, linking his work to the Italian notion of sprezzatura.

In 1992 he was unanimously awarded the União Latina Prize for Portuguese Painting, a decisive distinction for the international reach of his career. The following year he exhibited at Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome as part of the Romaeuropa Festival, and in 1994 the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in partnership with the Latin Union, presented the exhibition "Pedro Proença. Antologia, 1989-1993", conceived as an installation of painted wooden architectural structures, with false arcades, trompe-l’oeil effects and rolls of drawn paper.

In 1998 the Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris showed "Dessins. Pedro Proença", forty Indian ink drawings made in the 1980s and 1990s, accompanied by the text "As Falsas Apoteoses", written by the artist in response to Marcel Duchamp’s "The Creative Act".

His work is held in the collections of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Modern Art Centre and MACAM.