João Louro

João Louro was born in Lisbon in 1963, where he lives and works. He studied architecture at the Faculty of Architecture in Lisbon and painting at the Ar.Co art school. His work encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, and video.
Rooted in Minimal and Conceptual art, he pays particular attention to the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. His work maps out a topography of time, drawing on personal—but, above all, generational—references. He frequently utilizes language and the written word as source material, seeking to re-examine the role of the image in contemporary culture through a collection of representations and symbols drawn from our collective visual universe. Minimalism, conceptualism, pop culture, structuralism, and post-structuralism—along with thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot, and artists like Donald Judd and Barnett Newman—all form part of his lexicon of references.

In 2005, he participated in the exhibition Experiência da Arte (The Experience of Art) at the Italian Pavilion during the 51st Venice Biennale, curated by Maria de Corral. That same year, he also took part in Insite 05 – Art Practices in the Public Domain, held in San Diego (USA) and Tijuana (Mexico). Among his extensive list of solo exhibitions in Portugal and abroad, notable examples include Runway Car Crashed #2 at the Serralves Museum (1999), La Pensée et l’Erreur at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (2000), Blind Runner at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon (2004/2005), My Dark Places at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2010), Smuggling at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Elvas (2015), and Linguistic Ground Zero at MAAT in Lisbon (2018/2019). He was Portugal’s representative at the 2015 Venice Biennale with the exhibition I Will Be Your Mirror | Poems and Problems.