Rui Moreira - Transe
MAAT Central
26 FEB - 2 JUN 2025
Rui Moreira presents his largest museum exhibition and first retrospective, with about 80 medium and very large format drawings and paintings. He was one of the most significant Portuguese artists to emerge in the first decade of this century (with works in all the national museums of modern and contemporary art) and one of those with the most consolidated international career (with gallery representation in France, and works in private or institutional collections in Luxembourg, Belgium and Italy).
His work (drawing, photography and sculpture) is based on an obsessive labour with forms and materials, recreating national (Celtic and medieval) and international (North African, Slavic or Japanese) mythologies, mobilising literature, music, performance and pointing to strong realms of spirituality, magic and trance.
Rui Moreira (Porto, 1971) studied at ar.co – centro de arte e comunicação visual in Lisbon and at the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is often based on his travels and explorations. Through his creations, he experiences and restores the physical and psychological perceptions inherent in places like the Morocco desert, the source of the Ganges, the Amazon jungle, or the Trás-os-Montes region in northern Portugal.
In 2014, the Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean presented I Am a Lost Giant in a Burnt Forest, a major exhibition of his work. In 2015, Rui Moreira’s work entered the Collection Société Générale. In 2016, a set of ten works was exhibited at the Pavilhão Branco / Galerias Municipais in Lisbon. Entitled Os Pirómanos, this exhibition was then shown at CIAJG – Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães in 2017. In 2018, his work was included in the group exhibition Saudade – Unmemorable Place in Time at the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai and the Museu Coleção Berardo in Lisbon, and in 2023 in another group exhibition entitled I II III IV V – five decades of ar.co – centro de arte e comunicação visual, held at the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado, in 2023.
Rui Moreira has been working with the gallery Jeanne Bucher Jaeger since 2008, presenting several solo shows, the most recent of which was The Passengers in 2022.
