Rui Soares Costa

Rui Soares Costa (Lisbon, 1981) lives and works between Lisbon and Olho de Boi. He studied painting at Ar.Co, Lisbon, while completing his academic training, PhD, and research in Social Psychology between Portugal and the United States. Since 2013, he has been fully dedicated to the visual arts, beginning to exhibit in 2016. In 2020, he began aligning his research and artistic practice with his political and environmental thinking and activism. The year 2021 marked the beginning of the Rising series, which addresses the Anthropocene and the Climate Crisis as central issues of contemporaneity. During 2024, he initiated his work in video as a duo with André Gonçalves (RSC & AG). His current research and artistic practice focus on Time. He is interested in the perception (rather than representation) of Time through the manipulation of its suspension, distension, and compression — Time as a variable that can be shaped, like a parameter in an equation. His research and work are organized into series. Each series functions as an open-ended project, an active line of inquiry in constant dialogue with the others. The concepts and principles around which his work revolves include parsimony, minimalism, absence, seminality, nature, and materiality. His work frequently emerges through co-creation with the surrounding context.
He works closely with contemporary music, and his projects are often accompanied by original sound compositions. He has developed a sustained collaboration with the musician and multimedia artist André Gonçalves.
Since 2016, he has run the Bull’s Eye – Artist in Residence Program in his studio, which has hosted more than fifty artists, primarily international. He is represented by Salgadeiras Arte Contemporânea in Lisbon and by Untagged Art in Seville, Spain.