Vasco Mourão is a Portuguese artist who lives and works in Barcelona. An architect by training, the city and its representations are his favorite subject. He develops his meticulous practice of drawing on different supports, from the simple sheet of paper to the brass plate, passing through fragments of wood or marble. Starting from motifs and urban landscapes that he juxtaposes, deforms and accumulates – building facades, signs, neon lights – Vasco Mourão creates new dream worlds that show a teeming city, always in motion, in the manner of the megalopolises of Asia.

It was in Asia that Vasco began his exploration of the urban fabric, notably in Tokyo where he was in residence at Paradise Air in 2015 and 2016. His work has been exhibited numerous times in Portugal, Spain, Hong Kong and Japan. More recently, in April 2022, Vasco was selected for the Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize. Beyond the walls of his studio, he has also published several drawings in the press, notably for The Washington Post, The New Yorker and Wired.

In the exhibition No Man's Land, Vasco Mourão presents pieces from several series that allow us to understand his practice on different media: metal, marble and paper. Tokyo Lights – interlacing neon lights and signs inspired by his residence in Japan – thus responds to Elipse – a work on brass sheet in which the repeated motif of buildings acquires an endless movement. The human figure seems absent from Vasco's works, which show cities that we imagine to be full of life. It finally shows itself in the works of his latest series Archaeo, juxtaposed by transparency with always fragmentary urban landscapes, as if they were relics of the past. But more than relics, Vasco's works are archaeological vestiges of our contemporary worlds, in which the city becomes a living figure in its own right.