Augusto Alves da Silva (1963-2025)

It is with great sadness that MAAT marks the death of Augusto Alves da Silva, the renowned photographer represented in the EDP Foundation’s Art Collection. 

Over a career of four decades, Augusto Alves da Silva (1963–2025) forged one of the most original and singular paths in the Portuguese visual art scene. Through the mediums of photography and video, he produced a diverse and complex oeuvre that achieved wide critical and institutional acclaim in Portugal and abroad.

After abandoning his degree course in Civil Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Augusto Alves da Silva decided to train as an artist in London, first at London College of Printing and later at Slade School of Fine Arts. Even his first exhibitions, in the early 1990s, clearly demonstrated the structural qualities of his artistic practice: a sensitive and discerning eye that adopted the technical and aesthetic parameters of documentary genres, to develop an apparently objective style that nevertheless contained strong subjective and critical meanings. Alves da Silva was pioneering in the way he explored the suggestive, ironic and enigmatic potential of images.

Prominent among his vast oeuvre are his forays into the themes of landscape, the experience of travel, architecture and urban life, which frequently reveal his disillusionment with situations and events in the contemporary world. IST (1996), Uma cidade assim (A city like this, 1996), 3.16 (2003), Paisagens Inúteis (Useless Landscapes, 2006), Animais (Animals, 2007), Our Freedom (2004) and Iberia (2009) are some of the most noteworthy series from his creative career.

In 2011, Augusto Alves da Silva exhibited, at the EDP Foundation’s Electricity Museum, a group of photographs – Opera – which showed the building of the São Carlos National Theatre. The EDP Foundation’s collection includes photographs from the series Uma cidade assim and IST.