Pedro Besugo Portugal, b. 1971

Pedro Besugo lives and works in Lisbon. His artistic practice unfolds from drawing as a structure of thought, a device for construction, and an instrument for reading the territory. Working across drawing, painting, and sculpture, his research focuses on the systems that organise and configure space, including maps, plans, circulation networks, and urban and architectural structures, seeking to understand how memory, history, and processes of transformation become inscribed in the materiality of places.

Drawing constitutes the operative matrix of his entire body of work, frequently expanding into the three-dimensional field and assuming sculptural and installation-based forms. Through grids, urban patterns, lines of tension, and structural systems, Pedro Besugo constructs compositions that reveal invisible logics of territorial organisation, simultaneously invoking the scale of the city, architecture, and geology.

His recent research has further explored the relationship between geology, architecture, and construction, articulating different temporalities of sedimentation: the deep time of soil and matter, and the historical time of cities and their continuous metamorphosis. These references emerge in the form of stratified structures that operate as fields of interpretation, where distinct temporal and spatial layers coexist without fixing a literal representation of place.

Rather than representing specific territories, his work proposes a reflection on the instability of space and on the continuous processes of construction, erosion, displacement, and reconfiguration that define the contemporary experience of landscape. Within this context, process assumes a central role, asserting itself as an exercise in mapping and interpretation, akin to a visual archaeology of territory.

From an early age, the experience of travel profoundly shaped both his personal and artistic trajectory. While still very young, he travelled extensively throughout Europe and Asia, engaging with different communities and alternative urban contexts, experiences that fostered a particular sensitivity towards the social and spatial dynamics of the city and the territory.

In 1986, he entered the António Arroio Artistic School in Lisbon, an institution to which he later returned as a lecturer in the Department of Image and Audiovisual Communication between 2007 and 2010. In 2001, he completed a BA in Fine Arts in Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, and in 2011 obtained an MA in Arts and Education from Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon.

His work is included in several public and private collections, notably Fundação Oriente (Macau, China); Western Union Philippines, for the Art Collection of the Embassies in the Asia-Pacific Countries; the Embassy of Portugal in Tokyo; Banco Privado Atlântico (Lisbon); the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Lisbon); Museu do Trabalho Michel Giacometti (Setúbal); Valormed (Lisbon); Pfizer (Anderlecht, Belgium); Garrigues (Lisbon); and Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações (Lisbon).