Rui Paes

In 2008 Rui Paes was the Creator, General Curator and co-organizer of the exhibition "Looking at Picasso - Picasso and Portuguese Art of the 20th Century" which took place in Portimão in Portugal and included a show of photographs by Lee Miller entitled "Lee Miller & Picasso". "Looking at Picassso - Picasso and Portuguese Art of the 20th Century" became the blueprint for the exhibition "Picasso & Modern British Art" which took place at Tate Britain and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in 2012.

Between 1985 and 1990, the years the painter himself calls his Brutalist Period his pallet became very restricted, bereft, basically reduced to the colour red which subsequently matured into the pigment Caput Mortuum. In Britain and the US, these very large minimal paintings with their vessel like structures and raw aesthetics found the support of art benefactors and collectors Bruce A. Beal (Boston, Mass.), John Studzinski (CBE) and Peter and Maria Kellner. In Portugal two architects showed particular and effective support: Fernando Távora and Eduardo Souto de Moura.

Rui Paes is a painter, illustrator and muralist born in Pemba, Mozambique, in 1957. Paes completed a degree in Painting in 1981 at the Escola de Belas Artes do Porto and was awarded the Newcomers Prize at the Arús National Exhibition of Modern Art in 1982. He completed a Master of Arts in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1988, under a scholarship from The Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (Portugal) and a grant from the Beal Foundation, Boston (USA).