Ten exhibitions to see at MAAT in 2025
In 2025, MAAT will present 10 exhibitions that will take place in the various exhibition spaces of the MAAT Central and MAAT Gallery buildings.
The programme reinforces the museum's identity and emphasises its international dimension, while maintaining a dedicated focus on Portuguese artists - whether they are established figures, emerging talents, or innovators exploring new avenues of experimentation and discovery.
The 2025 programme also reinforces MAAT as an institution that promotes fruitful encounters, dialogues and diverse interpretations of the interplay between artistic practice and the complexities of our time. It positions the museum as a nexus connecting different geographies and cultural domains, from the popular to the erudite, from everyday experiences to the fundamental challenges of contemporary criticism and thought.
MAAT will present the first solo exhibitions in Portugal by renowned photographer Jeff Wall (who will occupy the entire MAAT Gallery building), as well as solo exhibitions by Swiss Painter Miriam Cahn, and Welsh artist and sculptor Cerith Wyn Evans. It will also mark the first time that Portuguese-French artist Isabelle Ferreira will show her work in Portugal.
The museum programme also includes Portuguese designer Rui Moreira's first retrospective, an exhibition in partnership with the Architecture Triennale 2025, a survey exhibition showcasing the work of Portuguese painter Pedro Casqueiro, and exhibitions by Portuguese artists Margarida Correia and Ana Léon.
Also noteworthy is the group show featuring works by the six finalists of the EDP Foundation New Artists Award 2024, Ahead of the EDP Foundation ArtGrand Prize being awarded later on in the year.
As part of its exhibition programme, the museum will host a variety of activations, including performances, discussions, and reflective sessions. These initiatives aim to enhance engagement while celebrating and expanding the diversity of the museum's audience.
Rui Moreira
Curator: João Pinharanda
Opens in February 2025
Rui Moreira presents his largest museum exhibition and first retrospective, with more than 100 medium and very large format drawings and paintings. He was one of the most significant Portuguese artists to emerge in the first decade of this century (with works in all the national museums of modern and contemporary art) and one of those with the most consolidated international career (with gallery representation in France, and works in private or institutional collections in Luxembourg, Belgium and Italy).
His work (drawing, photography and sculpture) is based on an obsessive labour with forms and materials, recreating national (Celtic and medieval) and international (North African, Slavic or Japanese) mythologies, mobilising literature, music, performance and pointing to strong realms of spirituality, magic and trance.
Rui Moreira (Porto, 1971) studied at Ar.co and the Art Institute of Chicago. He is represented in the EDP Foundation Art Collection.
Ana Léon
Curator: João Pinharanda
Opens in February 2025
Ana León was part of one of the most important groups of artists from the 1980s, alongside Pedro Calapez, Rosa Carvalho, Rui Sanches, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and José Pedro Croft. After an initial period in which installation and drawing were the favoured means of expression, from the 1990s onwards the artist developed a peculiar relationship with video (transcribed to digital from Super 8 originals), making very short pieces using stop motion techniques. Small moulded figures (between human and humanoid) performed in miniature theatres where everyday life and the absurd merged. More recently, she started using male puppets, created for a line of toys for teenagers. Through the development of repetitive gestures, veritable contemporary dance choreographies, these models of athletic masculinity from the 1970s and 1980s are confronted with their intrinsic fragility, falling over, turning in on themselves, looking at themselves in virtual mirrors.
Ana Léon (Lisbon, 1957) lives and works in Paris. She studied painting at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts and completed postgraduate studies in Aesthetics at the Université de Paris I, Sorbonne, in Paris.
Jeff Wall
Curator: Sérgio Mah
Opens in April 2025
Jeff Wall (Vancouver, Canada ,1946) is recognised as one of the biggest names on the international visual arts scene in recent decades. Since the 1970s, his photographic work has favoured the production of images that summon up situations and places that are both commonplace and symptomatic of everyday life. While working in photography, his work explores aesthetic and conceptual links with the fields of painting, literature, theatre and cinema, understood as correlative modes of representing and fictionalising reality.
Throughout his career, Jeff Wall's work has gained extensive critical and institutional recognition, including anthological exhibitions in museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA); the Tate Modern, London; the Stedeljik Museum, Amsterdam; the Beyeler Foundation, Basel; and the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels. In 2002, he was awarded the Hasselblad Prize, and several specialised magazines have placed him on the list of the ten most important artists today.
This will be the artist's first solo exhibition in Portugal and one of the largest of his work to date, comprising 60 photographs produced over more than forty years and occupying the entire exhibition space of the MAAT Gallery.
New Artists Award 2024
Curators: Sérgio Mah, Catarina Rosendo, Luís Silva
Opens in April 2025
MAAT presents the proposals of the six finalists of the EDP Foundation New Artists Award 2024: Alice dos Reis, Evy Jokhova, Francisco Trêpa, Inês Brites, Maja Escher, and Sara Chang Yan. These young artists were selected from around 600 applications by a jury made up of Catarina Rosendo (university professor and curator), Luís Silva (Curator and Director of Kunsthalle Lissabon), and Sérgio Mah (Deputy Director of MAAT). As part of this exhibition, an international jury will select the winning artist, whom the Foundation will award 20,000 euros.
Created in 2000, this biennial initiative is aimed at artists with short individual careers that have not yet been recognised, with no age limit, and in all forms of the plastic and visual arts. The EDP Foundation's New Artists Award is recognised as one of the most significant in the national art scene. With over two decades of history and a growing public dimension, it has helped to map the trajectory of successive generations of Portuguese artists.
Winners from previous editions include Joana Vasconcelos, Leonor Antunes, Vasco Araújo, Carlos Bunga, João Maria Gusmão, Pedro Paiva, João Leonardo, André Romão, Gabriel Abrantes, Priscila Fernandes, Ana Santos, Mariana Silva, Claire de Santa Coloma, Diana Policarpo, and Adriana Proganó.
Miriam Cahn
Curator: Sérgio Mah
Opens in June 2025
Miriam Cahn (Switzerland, 1949,) is a prominent figure on the European contemporary art scene and her work has received wide critical and institutional acclaim in recent years, following important monographic exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and Haus Der Kunst (Munich).
Her artistic practice involves various media and exploratory processes, including painting, drawing, performance, and installation. Associated with the motivations, attitudes, and discourses that marked the feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, Cahn's work centres on the body as a central medium and theme, through which she investigates physical, mental, and emotional aspects by means of strongly idiosyncratic and subjective plastic imaginaries, questioning conventions around gender, corporeality, desire, and violence. The exhibition at MAAT will focus mainly on her recent work, particularly her paintings and drawings, and is the result of a collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
This is Miriam Cahn's first solo exhibition in Portugal, following her participation in the Venice Biennale in 2022 and an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2023.
Cerith Wyn Evans
Curator: Sérgio Mah
Opens in October 2025
Linked to the strands and derivations of conceptual art, the artistic practice of Cerith Wyn Evans (Wales, 1958) explores how ideas can be communicated and reconfigured through different forms, materials, and media, including installation, sculpture, sound, photography, film, and text. Working at the beginning of his career in the field of experimental cinema, from the 1990s Cerith Wyn Evans’s work moved towards exploring themes linked to language and perception, crossing influences from cinema, music, literature, and philosophy. Exemplary of this are his now famous neon text sculptures, in which he quotes passages from literary texts or film subtitles to create works with a strong plastic sense that stimulate the viewer's imagination.
In recent years, Cerith Wyn Evans has had solo exhibitions at some of the most important international museums and art centres, such as the Centre Pompidou Metz (2024), the Pirelli HangarBicocca (2019), the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2018), Tate Britain, London (2017), and The Serpentine Gallery, London (2014). He has participated in the Venice Biennale (2003, 2010, 2017), the 4th Moscow Biennale (2011), the 3rd Yokohama Triennale, Japan (2008), and the 9th Istanbul Biennale (2005). In 2018, Evans won the Hepworth Wakefield Prize for Sculpture with his monumental work Composition for 37 Flutes, 2018.
Margarida Correia
Curator: João Pinharanda
Opens in October 2025
Particularly through photography, Margarida Correia investigates personal and institutional archives of specific communities, which she presents in exhibitions and through catalogues of great graphic richness.
In recent years she has been working on the memory of Portuguese emigrant communities in the USA. One of these exhibitions (held at Cinzeiro 8, Museu de Electricidade, 2011), entitled New World Parkville, resulted in a critically acclaimed catalogue.
Her new proposal addresses an issue that cuts across contemporary art related to historical questions of post-colonialism. Through interviews and material collection, Margarida Correia literally portrays a group of Portuguese army paratrooper nurses serving in Africa in the 1960s and 70s. Scenes from their professional and daily lives in Africa, moments of work and leisure. Once again, the aim is to record, recover, and fix individual and collective memories of a professional group that is little studied and understood. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, a specific study will be published on the data to be presented, which could become a milestone of great value for history in general, for the history of photography, the colonial war, and the role of women in this episode of Portuguese history.
Margarida Correia (Lisbon, 1972) lives and works in Lisbon. She is represented in the EDP Foundation Art Collection.
Isabelle Ferreira
Curator: Joana Neves
Opens in Octorber 2025
A name undergoing some consolidation in the French art scene, with numerous institutional exhibitions, urban public works and a presence in government collections, Isabelle Ferreira (France, 1972) works mainly according to the spaces available, creating a kind of sculptural furniture in which she inserts paintings, drawings, and various objects. But her focus is also political and social, namely the issue of economic emigration (she herself is the daughter of Portuguese emigrants) or exile.
This exhibition will therefore offer a global sensory experience: based on a choice of colours (from the plants found on clandestine emigration routes), materials (ceramics with the roughness of mountain stones), spaces (represented by photographs of the landscapes crossed). A series of huge drawings, made in situ, will complete a journey that, in the historical context in which we live, is perceived as both a personal memory and a universal testimony.
Fluxes (Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2025)
Curators: Territorial Agency
Opens in October 2025
Fluxes is an immersive group exhibition that, in the words of the curators, transforms the MAAT Central building into an Anthropocene Machine, an atlas of the 30 billion tonnes of waste produced by humanity. These are devices that mould energy, information, and material flows that accumulate over time and merge into the hard exoskeleton of human societies.
The exhibition takes place as part of the 7th Lisbon Triennale, programmed around the central question How Heavy is a City? / Quão pesada é uma cidade?, which addresses the complex transformations of the city and its context, revealing its new configuration of planetary magnitude. Understanding the agencies that sustain it drives a redefinition of architecture and what it means to build a collective territory.
The curators of Territorial Agency investigate the spatial dimensions of the Anthropocene, exploring emerging forms of co-operation and mutuality. The programme involves a multidisciplinary team with expertise ranging from science to philosophy and the arts, and consists of three central exhibitions – Fluxes, Spectres and Lighter – two books, three prizes, a conference cycle, and twelve independent projects. Triennale 2025 wants to open up a public space for learning, experimentation, disquiet, debate, enthusiasm, speculation, and action on the possible futures of cohabitation.
Pedro Casqueiro
Curator: João Pinharanda
Opens in November 2025
Along with Ana Vidigal, Alda Nobre, and Madalena Coelho, Pedro Casqueiro was part of one of the many informal groups of artists who attended ESBAL (now FBAUL) in the 1980s. His painting immediately stood out for its energy of colour and composition, for the in differentiation between non-figuration and figuration, between the painted image and the use of the written word, for its permanent sabotage of perspectives, hierarchies, and materials. The prevailing climate of a ‘return to painting’ and historical revisitations led critics to bring his early work closer to certain modernist solutions and Futurism (in the shattering of compositions) or Surrealism (in the opening up of images within images, in the plays of anamorphisms, or in the creation of elongated landscape spaces). Later, the textures, the more or less free lines that surrounded strong colours, were replaced by images we would almost say are graphic, clear lines delimiting soft colours, creating patterns (always irregular), letters that occupy the entire surface and make up neutral texts or ambiguous sentences, spaces of modernist architecture sabotaged by deliberate errors. This vast and diverse body of work establishes an ever-ironic relationship with reality.