Gabriel Abrantes is an artist and filmmaker based in Lisbon. For his first solo exhibition in the UK, he will present Bardo Loops, a four-channel video installation in which animated ghosts living in a dystopian future ravaged by rains, floods and fires have conversations, fight, argue, cry, break up and have sex. These avatars cycle through topics that are both real and current, oblivious to the ongoing devastation around them, fully absorbed in their own personal dramas.
The Lead Supporter for Gabriel Abrantes' exhibition is Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch). Gasworks’ Exhibitions programme is supported by Gasworks Exhibitions Supporters and public funding from Arts Council England.
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Gabriel Abrantes (b.1984, North Carolina, USA) is an artist and film-maker living in Lisbon. His works have been presented worldwide in museums including Collection Lambert (Avignon), Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg), MAAT (Lisbon), Tate Britain (London), Tate Modern (London), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Boston), Museu Serralves (Oporto) and Kunst-Werke (Berlin), ICA (London), Lincoln Center (NY), Caixa Forum (Madrid), CAM – Gulbenkian (Lisbon), amongst others.
His films premiered in competition at the Venice Biennale, the Berlinale and Locarno International Film Festival, where he won the Pardino d'Oro for A History of Mutual Respect (2010). He was shortlisted for the Berlinale Shorts competition with The Artificial Humours (2016), which was commissioned for the São Paulo Biennale exhibition Live Uncertainty (2016), and participated in the 16th Lyon Biennale, with A Brief History of Princess X and Les Extraordinaires Mésaventures de la Jeune Fille de Pierre (2022). In 2018, his film Diamantino (2018), which he co-directed with Daniel Schmidt, won the Grand Prize at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes. In 2014 he was a commissioned artist of the Biennal d’Image Mouvement - Centre d’art Contemporain de Genève (Switzerland). He received the EDP Young Artists Award in 2009, the Pardino d'Oro at the Locarno Film Festival in 2010, and the EFA Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2014 and 2016.
