Nuno Viegas

NUNO VIEGAS was born in Almeida in 1977. He studied Fine Arts – Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. From 2001 to 2015, he held annual solo exhibitions at Galeria Arte Periférica in Lisbon. During the same period and up to the present, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. In 2005, he illustrated issues 166, 167, and 168 of Revista Colóquio Letras, published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. From 2013 to 2015, he lived and worked in Berlin in a studio integrated into the BBK (Berufsverband Bildender Künstler Berlin). Since 2016, he has lived and worked in Castanheira, where, with the support of the company Toino Abel, he restored part of the ruins of a former nightclub, transforming the space into the studio where he resided for two years—a project conceived with the aim of hosting a future artistic residency program. That same year, he became part of Juncateatro – Teatro Regional do Juncal as a set designer, costume designer, and actor, and has also collaborated occasionally with Leirena, the Leiria Theatre Company. In recent years, he has made public his exploration of sound through real-time compositions, which he likes to describe as soundtracks for the written word or improvisations inducing spontaneous verbalization. His work is predominantly figurative, with recent forays into abstraction, focusing on the materiality of drawing and painting. He seeks to bear witness to the process, valuing improvisation and attention to accidents, within a narrative engagement from a standpoint largely committed to the absurd. His work is represented in several private collections in Portugal and abroad, as well as in the Graphothek in Berlin, the PLMJ Foundation, and the Elvas Museum of Contemporary Art.