About
Vhils works by intervening in the surfaces that shape everyday life — walls, billboards, doors, metal, paper, wood, video and public space. His practice treats each material as an archive, removing rather than adding to reveal the people, histories and tensions embedded within contemporary urban experience.
At the centre of Vhils’ practice is an inversion of image-making. Rather than building through accumulation, he creates by removing: cutting, drilling, etching or blasting through the surfaces that surround us. The result is not simply an image, but a form of excavation in which material becomes witness.
Emerging from graffiti culture in Lisbon in the early 2000s, his work was first publicly developed through the Scratching the Surface project and came to international attention at the Cans Festival in London in 2008. Since then, the practice has unfolded across more than 30 countries, moving between streets, museums, public commissions and experimental formats.
Across carved walls, paper, metal, wood, video, light, sculpture, installation and pyrotechnic works, Vhils has developed a language in which destruction is generative. Each medium carries its own time: the sediment of architecture, the grain of wood, the corrosion of metal, the flash of an explosion. His work asks what surfaces record, and what contemporary life chooses to erase.
Biography
Alexandre Farto (b. Lisbon, 1987) began working in the urban environment as Vhils in the early 2000s, within a Lisbon marked by rapid post-industrial and suburban transformation. From graffiti, he developed a practice based not on adding another image to the city, but on cutting into its existing surfaces. His Scratching the Surface approach, first presented publicly at VSP in Lisbon in 2007 and internationally at the Cans Festival in London in 2008, established subtraction as both technique and critical method.
Since then, his work has expanded across walls, billboards, metal, wood, styrofoam, paper, video, installation and pyrotechnic processes, appearing in more than 30 countries. Trained at Byam Shaw School of Art and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, Vhils moves between public space, institutional exhibitions and commissioned projects without treating them as separate worlds.
Founded in 2010, Vhils Studio structures the production, research and logistics behind this body of work. The studio enables projects at scales ranging from intimate editions to large public interventions, while also supporting initiatives that connect artistic production with communities, urban contexts and cultural platforms such as Underdogs.
Key exhibitions
- Forever Is Now — Pyramids of Giza, Giza
- We Are Here — Petit Palais, Paris
- Icons of Urban Art — Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo
- Strata — MUCA, Munich
- Multitude — MIMA, Brussels
- Prisma — MAAT, Lisbon
- Beyond the Streets — Saatchi Gallery, London
- Ex Situ — Centre Pompidou, Paris
- Lasco Project #3 — Palais de Tokyo, Paris
- L’Île Intérieure — Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles
- UNESCO Headquarters — Paris
- Loading — Grand Palais Immersif, Paris
- Barbican Centre — London
- Cans Festival — London
Permanent collections
- V&A, Victoria and Albert Museum — London
- Pérez Art Museum Miami — Miami
- Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego — San Diego
- EDP Foundation Collection — Lisbon
- MAR, Museu de Arte do Rio — Rio de Janeiro
- MUCA, Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art — Munich
- UNESCO Art Collection — Paris
Representation
- Galeria Vera Cortês — Lisbon, Portugal
- Galerie Danysz — Paris, France · Shanghai, China
- Baró Galeria — Palma de Mallorca, Spain · Abu Dhabi, UAE
- Underdogs — Lisbon, Portugal (public art, editions & gallery)
Contact
General info@vhilstudio.com · press press@vhilstudio.com. See the full contact page.