Henrique Pavão
Henrique Pavão
Henrique Pavão (Lisbon, 1991) employs sculpture, video, sound, and photography to assemble scattered fragments into unexpected encounters that evoke the ritualistic, the enigmatic, and the anachronistic. By working with entropy as creative matter, echoing the canonical tropes of 1970s conceptual art, his practice unfolds within a broader territory aligned with open-ended processes, where the agency of materials or chance determines the outcome. From the manual dexterity that arises in the unforeseen and the repetitive gesture, Pavão maps a poetic cartography in which artefact and ruin emerge as signs of a suspended temporality, between anticipation and absence.
Henrique Pavão lives and works in Lisbon. He graduated in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Lisbon (2013), and completed a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at Malmö Art Academy (2016), under the supervision of Joachim Koester. He has been a grantee of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2015 and 2024), FLAD – Luso-American Development Foundation (2022), Fundación Marcelino Botín (2021), and the Royal Academy of Arts Stockholm (2016). In 2016, he was awarded the Edstrandska Stiftelsens Prize and nominated for the Novo Banco Revelação Prize at Fundação de Serralves and, in 2019, was shortlisted for the 13th edition of the EDP Foundation New Artists Prize. His work has been presented both nationally and internationally, including Rialto6 (Lisbon, 2025), Centro Botín (Santander, Spain, 2024), Frame Section at Frieze New York (USA, 2021), Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar (Lisbon, 2021), CAV – Centro de Artes Visuais (Coimbra, Portugal, 2020), MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon, 2019), Galeria Municipal do Porto (Oporto, Portugal, 2019), Anozero – Biennial of Coimbra (Coimbra, Portugal, 2017), Culturgest (Oporto, Portugal, 2017), Appleton Square (Lisbon, 2022 and 2017), and the Royal Academy of Arts (Stockholm, Sweden, 2016), among others. His work is represented in institutional collections such as the Portuguese State Contemporary Art Collection, CACE; MAAT/EDP Foundation Collection (Lisbon); EGEAC/CML Collection (Lisbon); Fundação Leal Rios (Lisbon); António Cachola Collection, MACE (Elvas, Portugal); Rialto6 Collection (Lisbon); and Museu de Arte Contemporânea Armando Martins, MACAM (Lisbon), among others.