Rui Sanchez was born in Lisbon in 1954. He began attending the Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon in 1974, but dropped out during his third year to join the Ar.Co Centro for Art and Visual Communication, where he attended basic training. Unfortunately for the artist, who had finally found his calling, the instability of the revolutionary period forced the courses at Ar.Co to be put on hold. At the end of the summer of 1975, at the invitation of Arch. Pedro Vieira de Almeida, his teacher the previous year, he went to Bragança, Trás-os-Montes, to work at the local GAT (Technical Support Office). In the autumn of 1976, he returned to Ar.Co, enrolling in the drawing and painting studios, at the time run respectively by Manuel Costa Cabral and João Hogan.
Encouraged by Robin Fior, then a design professor at Ar.Co, Sanchez went to London to meet several people and explore the possibility of studying there. In May 1977, he was accepted into the first year of the BA at Goldsmiths’ College. During his three years of training in London he stopped painting and, during this time of experimentation, explored different artistic media and languages, mainly in the form of installations. He frequented the city’s museums with great assiduity, namely the National Gallery of Art, and associated with important names on the local scene: Michael Craig-Martin, Yehuda Safran, Richard Wentworth, Tony Carter and Sarat Maraj.
Owing to his growing interest in American art, he applied for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) at Yale University. He left for the United States in August 1980, on a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The stimulating change in environment saw him focusing more strongly on sculpture, and beginning to use wood and its derivatives as his main construction material. As in London, he came into contact with important local artists: Donald Judd, Vito Aconcci, George Trakas and Barry le Va.
Sanchez returned to Lisbon in June 1982. In the following academic year, he began teaching at Ar.Co. His return coincided with the beginning of his recognition on the local scene. In 1983, he exhibited for the first time in Lisbon, at Ar.Co, in an exhibition of works by professors in the drawing department. In May 1984, he held his first solo exhibition, Windows, maps, mirrors, at the SNBA Modern Art Gallery. In June 1986, at the invitation of Manuel Reis, he decorated the ‘Frágil’, a pioneer bar in Bairro Alto, which, during the eighties, was a meeting place for people linked to the arts.
Since then, numerous important exhibitions and projects have punctuated Sanchez’s career, among many others: 1st prize in the Prémio Jovem Escultura Unicer, Serralves Foundation (1988); ‘Some martyred saints and an un-Catholic figure’, Galeria Atlântica, Porto (1990); Artforum collaboration (1990); Drawings, the Centre for Modern Art of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1991); Body Building, Loja da Atalaia, Lisbon (1992); Silence to light, Watari Museum, Tokyo (1992); Steel sculpture, Olaias metro station (1998); Anthology of drawings, Museum of Contemporary Art, Funchal (1999); To Marat drawings, Francisco e Henrique Franco Museum (1999); Sculpture+Drawing, White Pavilion of the City Museum, Lisbon (2000); retrospective, Centro de Arte Moderna, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2001); the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation commissions a medal commemorating Sanchez’s fifty years of creating (2006); Solid and Liquid, Porto Santo Museum, Porto (2006); Anthology of drawings, travelling exhibition: Centro Cultural de Lagos, Centro Cultural de Cascais, and Galeria Munícipal de Matosinhos (2006); (in)forma, major anthological exhibition, Municipal Museum of Tavira/Palácio da Galeria.
