Vasco Mourão is a Portuguese artist who lives and works in Barcelona. Trained as an architect, the city and its representations are his preferred subject. He develops his meticulous drawing practice on various media, from a simple sheet of paper to brass plates, including fragments of wood or marble. Starting with urban motifs and landscapes that he juxtaposes, distorts, and accumulates—building facades, signs, neon lights—Vasco Mourão creates new dreamlike universes that reveal a teeming, ever-changing city, reminiscent of Asian megacities.

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

Within the exhibition No Man's Land, Vasco Mourão presents pieces from several series that allow us to grasp his practice across different media: metal, marble, and paper. Tokyo Lights—an interlacing of neon lights and signs inspired by his time living 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 depict cities that we nevertheless imagine to be teeming with life. It finally appears in the works of his latest series, Archaeo, juxtaposed through transparency with urban landscapes that remain fragmented, 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 entity in its own right.