Luis Lazaro Matos

Luis Lázaro Matos is a Portuguese visual artist and musician, born in Évora in 1987 and currently living and working in Lisbon. He graduated from Art Practice at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has been recognized for his work, including a nomination for the EDP Novos artistas prize in 2013 and winning the Fulbright-Fundação Carmona e Costa scholarship in 2016.

Matos' practice includes murals, painting, drawing, text, and video to create theater-like environments, which function as performative stages for the narratives proposed. The immersive spaces are designed to establish an intense alliance with the audience and are created to allow visitors to become part of the experience, rather than just isolated agents. Matos' work focuses on the overlaps between architecture and fiction, exploring how intimate and social narratives shape the way space is experienced.

He also reflects on storytelling as a means to fashion pictorial and spatial configurations, social norms, and political agendas. Recently, Matos' practice has become more immersive, employing a multi-sensory language and including exploratory drifts with sound and music. His work has been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions, including Notes on Cosmic Pluralism at 1646 in The Hague, ZOO at Casa da Cerca in Almada, Summer Waterfalls and Autumn Leaves at Beursschouwburg in Brussels, and The Dancing Followers at Combo in Milan. His latest project, Waves and Whirlpools, was hosted by Galeria Municipal do Porto and curated by Martha Kirszenbaum.