Rui Chafes was born in Lisbon in 1966. He quickly adopted sculpture as a means of expression, a medium he studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (1984-1989). He later furthered his training at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Gerhard Merz. There, he consolidated research on German art and culture begun in his native Portugal, but also discovered the likes of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist and Novalis, even translating the latter’s Fragments from German into Portuguese. Late-Romantic German intellectuals have had a big influence on Chafes’ corpus. The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Marie Rilke, Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn, and their take on nature in particular, have had a lasting impact.
Chafes largely pursues these intellectual enquiries in iron, a material he made ‘his’ very early on. He paints it various colours, but chiefly black (especially from the 1980s onwards). Aesthetically, his sculpture furthers the organic enquiries of modern pioneers such as Moore, Hepworth, Arp and Brancusi. Jellyfish, spiders, bacteria and prehistoric bodies populate his early work. The curve is the dominant form, accentuating the sense of wholeness of form but hollowness of volume favoured at the beginning of the century. The often monumental scale of Chafes’ work also emulates the natural settings he prefers.
More recent works have taken a decidedly erotic turn, evoking the masks, chains, restraints and other appendages of BDSM sexual practices, all while conserving the ambivalently protective armour or cage-like qualities of early iterations.
Chafes first showed works in Belgium in 1991, on the occasion of the Tríptico group exhibition, the selection of which spoke to Chafes’ Germanic interests. Since then, his work has travelled the world: Museum Folkwang (Essen, Germany); Esbjerg Kunstmuseum (Denmark); Nikolaj Contemporary Art Centre (Copenhagen, Denmark); Fondazione Volume! (Rome, Italy); Fundação Eva Klabin (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); Fundación Luis Seoane (A Coruña, Spain); Hara Museum (Tokyo, Japan); Museu de Arte Moderna (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); and the Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea).
Chafes has also represented Portugal in various biennales: the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995; the 26th São Paulo Biennial in 2004; and the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, where he was invited to exhibit in the Republic of Cuba’s pavilion.
Notable recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition in the Sassi di Matera, Italy, in 2011; large-scale public sculptures dotted around the city of Bamberg, Germany, in 2018, and a dialogue exhibition with the corpus of Alberto Giacometti shown at the Fondation Gulbenkian, Paris, in late 2018. For this last unique event, Chafes created seven sculptures engaging in a dialogue with the Swiss master’s fifteen selected works.
