Born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1977, Rui Miguel Leitão Ferreira lives and works between Lisbon and Vienna. He graduated in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon in 2005 and received his MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2012. His work has been exhibited widely, with selected museum and institutional exhibitions including Constellations: A Choreography of Minimal Gestures at Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2019); In the Kingdom of Clouds: Artists and the Invention of Sintra at MU.SA – Sintra Museum of the Arts (2021); and his 2025 solo exhibition Poderia Vê-lo a Trabalhar o Dia Todo at MU.SA.
Ferreira’s practice moves between figuration and abstraction, exploring painting as both image and physical object. His works emerge through the layering, transferring, peeling, cutting, and reassembling of painted surfaces, bringing material, gesture, intuition, and chance into continuous interaction. Attentive to the thickness, elasticity, opacity, and chemical behaviour of paint, he allows the material itself to participate in the formation of the image. The resulting works occupy an ambiguous territory between painting and sculpture, balancing intention and unpredictability, complexity and simplicity, material presence and image.