The 2024 Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize

Ana Cardoso (Lisbon, 1978) lives and works between Lisbon and New York. Her multifaceted painting practice employs an array of medium-specific approaches: from abstraction to formlessness, materiality to illusion, conceptualism to the ready-made. She explores painting’s elastic content in relation to its context, its production in relation to its presentation; and pivots between the viewer and the history of painting. For her, throughout history but also in this digital age, the viewer activates and performs the painting, its flatness and its depths. She works with predefined structures – modular canvases that fit comfortably the length of her open arms, (triangles, squares, parallelograms, rectangles etc.) – that mutate into dynamic new compositions which are then again reshuffled, recombined, stacked, or moved through a vast landscape of fragments. Cardoso’s paintings reveal different dimensions throughout the different moments of their production and exhibition process. Optical folds are suggested when the works are installed; her configurations play with recto-verso concepts and three-dimensionality; front and back are simultaneously presented to activate the broader site of painting. Within Ana Cardoso’s inclusive painting corpus, Neo-Concretism and Formalism stand out as open source alphabets that the body inhabits to reformulate former logics and parameters, using structure and the monochrome as vessels for romantic experimentation, site of accidents, contamination, and a continuous stream of self-reflexive and mediated gestures.

Ana Cardoso received her MA in Fine Art from the Hunter College, New York, in 2006.

Cardoso has had solo or duo exhibitions at MAAT Museum, Lisbon (2023); Renata Fabbri, Milan (2023); Nuno Centeno, Porto (2019); Parapet Real Humans, St Louis (2018); Temnikova & Kasela, Tallin (2017); Jablonka Maruani Mercier, Knokke (2016); Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2015); MNAC, Lisbon (2015); Longhouse Projects, New York (2014); Maisterravalbuena, Madrid (2012); among others.

Some of her group exhibitions include venues such as Galerias Municipais – Galeria da Boavista, Lisbon (2022); Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2018–19); Rachel Uffner, New York (2015); Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, Cluj (2012); Marianne Boesky, New York (2012); Prague Biennial 5, Prague (2011); Tate St Ives, Cornwall (2011); Simone Subal, New York (2011); The Kitchen, New York (2009).

Her work has been featured in Artforum, Flash Art, Mousse, Modern Painters, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Contemporânea, and included in the survey book Painting Now edited by Suzanne Hudson, published by Thames & Hudson (London) in 2015.

She has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2019–20) and was a fellow of Shandaken: Projects, Paint School master class, New York (2018–19).