Hugo Canoilas (*1977 in Portugal) has developed a heterogeneous group of works mostly by the use of painting, ranging from the erudite to the popular and using poetry, philosophy and political thought. Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa and Kierkegaard mark his interest in otherness, which imposes on his work a permanent movement and correlated to Provo and International Situationist movements. The heterogeneity of Canoilas’s work challenge notions of authorship in a dichotomy between absolute visibility and difficulties in reduce his work to information or a commodity.
Canoilas has been featured at major international spaces including Destination Wien at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Someone a long time ago, now, at Cooper Gallery, Dundee, When elephants come marching in at De Appel, Amsterdam, Performance Proletarians at Le Magasin, Grenoble, 30th São Paulo Biennial in 2012 and prior to this, exhibitions at Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon and the Institute for Contemporary Art, London among others. Canoilas has received widespread recognition for his work in major publications such as Art Review, Guardian, Observer, Frieze, Metropolis M and Flash Art. Canoilas is represented by Workplace Gallery (Gateshead/London), Galeria Quadrado Azul (Porto/Lisbon), Gallery Nosbaum Reding (Luxembourg) and Galeria Collicaligreggi (Catania). He lives and works in Vienna.
