Since the early 1990s, the work of Pedro Cabrita Reis (born 1956 in Lisbon) has revolved around themes of the house, habitation, architecture, and territory.

Alongside works that draw on elements of everyday life—such as tables and chairs, doors and windows—Cabrita Reis has repeatedly developed large-scale installations that assert a powerful physical presence within exhibition spaces.

Using rough brick walls, found objects, and industrial materials such as neon tubes, glass panes, steel beams, or raw wooden planks, he deliberately disrupts the conventions of the white cube or, at times, radically reclaims historically charged interiors—transforming, for instance, a baroque hall into a dense cluster of favela-like structures. His roughly assembled house forms, such as The Project (2002), deny access and visibility: doors open onto nothing, staircases lead into emptiness.

Blind Cities, the title of an important group of works, encapsulates the stoic, melancholic tone that runs through Cabrita Reis’s practice. It points to the condition of human “unhousedness” as a fundamental aspect of the human condition and thus to one of the central motifs underlying his oeuvre.