Pedro Cabrita Reis (1956) - Listening to the trees (I), Listening to the trees (II), Listening to the trees (III)

Listening to the trees (I, II and III), folder no. 38 of The Print Subscribers Club, published in 2018 by Benveniste Contemporary, in Madrid. It contains three original drypoints by Pedro Cabrita Reis (Lisbon, 1956), each printed from a copper plate on hand-cut 350 g Hahnemühle paper, measuring 38 × 32 cm (15 × 12 5/8 inches).

Each sheet is pencil-signed "Cabrita 18", numbered 35/55 and stamped with the artist’s dry seal. The edition is limited to 55 numbered copies, XXV artist’s proofs, one BAT, III H/C and five archive copies, four of which are deposited in the National Library of Spain.

The edition was printed by Elena Alonso at the Benveniste Contemporary workshop, under the supervision of Dan Albert Benveniste, and bound by Crisalva. It is delivered in its original orange fabric folder, with the artist’s name printed in white on the cover, together with the certificate of authenticity signed by Benveniste and numbered 35/55 and the production sheet.

Condition: new. The sheets have not been framed or exhibited. The photographs have been light- and color-corrected from shots of the actual copy; the room image is a staged montage and the frame is not included in the lot.

Sold by a private collector. Shipped in rigid flat packaging, with tracking.

In December 2024 Pedro Cabrita Reis announced that he would donate his personal archive to the Serralves Foundation, in Porto: thousands of letters, photographs, sketches, notebooks and posters gathered over nearly half a century. Few living Portuguese artists have an archive worthy of that destination. He does.

Cabrita Reis was born in Lisbon in 1956 and earned a degree in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon in 1983. He is the Portuguese artist of his generation with the greatest international presence, and his work is essential to understanding European sculpture since the mid-1980s. He builds with humble, workmanlike materials: cork, corten steel, fluorescent tubes, doors, brick, demolition debris. With them he erects structures that read as houses, windows or fragments of a city, and which always retain something of drawing made in space.

The list of international citations is long. He participated in documenta IX in Kassel in 1992 and documenta 14 in 2017; in the São Paulo Biennials of 1994 and 1998; in Lyon 2009. He represented Portugal at the 50th Venice Biennale, in 2003, returned in 2013 with A Remote Whisper and presented Field in San Fantin Church during the 59th edition. He has exhibited at Kunsthalle Bern, the Camden Arts Centre in London, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the MAXXI in Rome, the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela and Serralves, which devoted to him A Roving Gaze in 2019. His work is in the Tate, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In 2024 he gathered in Lisbon, under the title Atelier, more than 1,500 works spanning about fifty years of work.

In the print, he applies the same economy. Listening to the trees are three drypoints on copper, editioned in 2018 by Benveniste Contemporary, in which the needle works as a quick pencil would: densely inked black hatchings, straight lines crossing the plate from edge to edge, and circles drawn in a single gesture. The second print, with the plate cut in a corner, is the most architectural of the three and the one that best sums up his sculpture.