Conference Cycle Great Artists on Campus #5: Carlos Bunga

Carlos Bunga (b. 1976, Porto) is a Portuguese artist who lives and works near Barcelona. He studied at the School of Arts and Design of Caldas da Rainha, Portugal, completing his studies in the early 2000s. His formative years were marked by displacement: in 1978, his family moved to the Forte de Peniche, a former prison converted into a refugee reception centre, where they lived for five years before relocating to social housing in the same region.

Bunga’s process-driven practice spans multiple formats, including sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, video and, predominantly, site-specific installations that engage directly with their architectural context. Working mainly with humble, everyday materials such as cardboard and adhesive tape, he creates works of striking aesthetic refinement and conceptual complexity, exploring the interplay between construction and deconstruction, permanence and ephemerality, the intimate and the monumental.

Transcending traditional boundaries between sculpture and painting, his deceptively fragile works are characterised by an intensive chromatic and material investigation, while emphasising the performative dimension of the creative act. His works on paper, closely related to his sculptural installations, frequently employ layering techniques—compositional elements in paintings or translucent sheets in drawings—producing analytical results reminiscent of double photographic exposures, mirroring the dual experience of memory and imagination inherent in his sculptural practice.

Bunga received the EDP New Artists Prize (2003) and the International Artist Prize in Grand Rapids, Michigan (2013), and was shortlisted for Artes Mundi 6, Cardiff (2015). Solo exhibitions include Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2025), Sarasota Art Museum (2023), Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2022), Secession, Vienna (2021), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020), MAAT, Lisbon (2019), MACBA, Barcelona (2015) and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011). His work is held in major collections including MoMA, New York, Fundação Serralves, Porto, and Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, where the solo exhibition Habitar a Contradição remains on view at CAM until 30 March.