RUI CHAFES

Rui Chafes was born in Lisbon in 1966 and continues to live and work in the city today. He trained as a sculptor at the Faculdade de Belas Artes, graduating in 1989. From 1990 to 1992, he studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf under Gerhard Merz, one of the most significant painters of his generation, whose artistic practice expanded and refined some of the fundamental principles of Modernism. Merz's large-scale wall works, environmental installations, and site-specific interventions — characterised by formal rigour, the use of light, and a minimalist conception of space — undoubtedly had a significant influence on Chafes's artistic development. During his time in Germany, Chafes was also able to deepen his interest in German literary and philosophical culture. He became fascinated by the work of writers and thinkers associated with late Romanticism, including Friedrich Hölderlin and Heinrich von Kleist, and developed a particular affinity with the thought of Novalis, whose Fragments he translated into Portuguese in 1992. Upon returning to Portugal, his strong connection with his native landscape, between the Atlantic coast and the Sintra region, contributed to the development of his distinctive sensitivity to the environment and helped shape his visual imagination, while also nurturing his interest in organic forms. Although physically heavy, his sculptures seem to float through the purity of their forms and their apparent immateriality, constantly inhabiting a suspended realm between perception and reality, life and death, mind and body. Throughout his career, Chafes has participated in numerous international exhibitions and has held solo exhibitions in galleries and museums across Portugal and in several other countries. His work is represented in a number of institutional and private collections. In 1995, he represented Portugal at the 46th Venice Biennale alongside José Pedro Croft and Pedro Cabrita Reis, while in 2004 he participated in the São Paulo Biennial with a collaborative choreographic project with Vera Mantero. In 2011, he held a solo exhibition in the Sassi di Matera in Italy. In 2022, the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves dedicated the exhibition Chegar sem partir to his work, bringing together pieces created at different stages of his career and installed both inside the museum and throughout its park. In the same year, he participated in the project Le reste est ombre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, together with filmmaker Pedro Costa and photographer Paulo Nozolino.