Rui Chafes (Lisbon, 1966) lives and works in Lisbon. He has exhibited regularly in Portugal and abroad since the late 1980’s, having represented Portugal at the 1995 Venice Biennale and the 2004 São Paulo Biennial. In 2013, he was one of the several international artists invited to exhibit at the Pavilion of the Republic of Cuba at the 55th Venice Biennale.
His work has been exhibited at institutions such as CAM – Calouste Gulbenkian Fondation (Lisbon), Fundação de Serralves (Porto), Museu Coleção Berardo (Lisbon), SMAK (Gent), Museum Folkwang Essen, Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, Kunsthallen Nikolaj (Copenhagen), Fondazione Volume! (Rome), Fundação Eva Klabin (Rio de Janeiro), Fundación Luis Seoane (A Coruña), among others.
In 2018, he held an exhibition of large sculptures in various public spaces in the city of Bamberg, Germany. In the same year he held an exhibition ‘in dialogue’ with Alberto Giacometti at the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris.
In 2004, he received the Robert-Jacobsen Sculpture Prize from the Stiftung Würth in Germany. In 2015, he received the Pessoa Prize, awarded by the Expresso newspaper.