The Promised Land of Lisbon’s Artworld, a Decade On

A few years ago everyone and their nan seemed to be packing up shop and moving to Lisbon. Exhausted, broke and beaten by their punishing, grey existences in other European capitals, artists, dealers, DJs, crypto evangelists and all species of creative multihyphenate flocked to the sunny, relatively cheap city. In 2022 Portugal introduced its digital nomad visa, and the MacBook professionals descended in droves. From 2012 to 2023, golden visas were snatched up by those with cash to spend, seduced by cheap property and attractive tax breaks. Tech conferences filled the hotels. New museums opened their doors. The next Berlin, the new Brussels, our own San Fran, they said.

 2026 marks the tenth anniversaries of the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) and of ARCOlisboa (held 28–31 May this year), the international edition of ARCOmadrid, Spain’s premier contemporary art fair. “To be honest, it was a happy coincidence,” the fair’s director, Maribel López, tells The Art Journal. “Both institutions saw, each in its own way, Lisbon as a city with great potential and a very special context for the development of art.” A lot has happened in the decade that followed: Portugal has weathered political instability (the last three years have seen three general elections) and a political swing to the right; the golden visa programme, estimated to have brought in some €7.3 billion in foreign investment, was scrapped, having been declared by former prime minister António Costa as a ‘fiscal injustice’ that had triggered a housing crisis, barred Portuguese citizens from the property ladder and exacerbated the brain drain of young professionals leaving the country; the reinstatement of said golden visas by the succeeding administration; a suite of new tax incentives for skilled professional immigrants and biotech ventures; and a particularly bad pandemic for one of the Eurozone’s lowest-income economies. So how is the new promised land for artists, musicians and SEO consultants faring a decade on? For those who made the jump, and for those who stayed the course, has it been worth it?

ARCOlisboa, 2026. Photo: Rodrigo Gatinho. Courtesy ARCOlisboa

In October 2016 MAAT was unveiled on the northern shore of the River Tagus like the prow of a docking ship. Designed by the British architect Amanda Levete for the EDP Foundation, the nonprofit arm of Portugal’s largest energy company, the astounding building’s serpentine, swooshlike structure has quickly become one of the city’s defining architectural landmarks. The response was immediate. More than 22,000 visitors reportedly passed through the museum’s doors on the first day alone.

Without question, the cultural imprint of the museum, which sits alongside MAAT Central, the former Tejo thermoelectric power station that houses EDP’s permanent collection of 2,500 artworks, has been significant. Major international artists such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Miriam Cahn, Jeff Wall, Jonathas de Andrade, Cerith Wyn Evans, Anthony McCall and most recently Ana Maria Maiolino (on view until 31 August) have seen their first Portuguese solo institutional exhibitions presented here.

So too has been its impact on the city’s urban geography, representing a profound transformation of public space: with one of Lisbon’s most extraordinary views, onto the 25 de Abril Bridge, its terrace and public garden have become a key gathering point for Lisboetas; its roof narrows into a pedestrian bridge over the railway line, linking the once poorly connected industrial zone of Belém-Alcântara to the city centre; cafés and bars in former shipping containers now stretch along the river. Miguel Coutinho, EDP Foundation’s general director, recalls how the museum’s opening day was accompanied by “the conviction that something was about to change in the city’s relationship with the river”.

The location’s symbolism isn’t lost on João Pinharanda, MAAT’s artistic director. Belém is “where everything began for Portugal as an international country, where the new vision for Lisbon was created”, he tells The Art Journal. Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would set sail from here to explore and trade with India and the Orient. The country’s contemporary art scene, in its own way, has spent the last decade pursuing similar ambitions of global expansion.

Today the area is a buzzy cultural quarter frequented by lovers of art, architecture and pastéis de nata. MAC/CCB – Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre at the Belém Cultural Centre – is close by, which rebranded and reopened in 2023 after the state seized the collection of the disgraced collector José Berardo as collateral for the $1 billion he owed following his arrest for fraud and money laundering in 2021. A stone’s throw from MAAT is Cordoaria Nacional, the former rope factory that ARCOlisboa takes over every year. Last year saw the opening of MACAM – Museu de Arte Contemporânea Armando Martins, a sprawling museum and luxury hotel complex in what was an eighteenth-century palace. Further (re)openings  across the city, such as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s long-awaited renovation of its Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) in 2024, signal a broader transformation in Portuguese cultural infrastructure, increasingly fuelled by private capital.

For many in Lisbon’s artworld, this proliferation of private foundations and museums is long overdue. “Private investment within the arts and culture was never really incentivised,” says Carolina Trigueiros of Jahn und Jahn, the Munich gallery that opened a Lisbon space in 2022, joining a list of international galleries opening outposts here, among them This Is Not A White Cube (Luanda), Monitor (Rome), DOCUMENT (Chicago) and Encounter (London), as well as international dealers opening their first spaces here, such as ADZ and Madragoa (which recently announced its merger with Warsaw’s Galeria Dawid Radziszewski).

There is a growing awareness “that culture and arts is a key element for a city, to bring not only a specific type of tourism, but also dialogue and the exchange of positions”, Trigueiros continues. The state is urging more wealthy individuals to step up. This April at the inauguration of MUZEU, a private museum in the northern city of Braga, Portugal’s new socialist president, António José Seguro, spoke at length of ‘the social responsibility of wealth’, arguing that the rich should see cultural patronage not just as an ego flex but as their ‘moral obligation’. EDP seems to share this view. The foundation is also behind Electra, a bilingual arts journal published in 14 countries, and two national visual arts prizes. Last month, €50,000 was awarded to artist João Penalva, who returned to Lisbon in 2021 after four decades in London.

MACAM, Lisbon. Photo: Fernando Guerra I FG+SG. Courtesy MACAM - Museu de Arte Contemporanea Armando Martins

Danny Lamb, founder of ADZ gallery, left London’s artworld in 2021 on something of a whim, arriving in Lisbon with little more than a small loan and the resolution to make it work before the cash ran out. Within a couple of weeks he’d found a space in the city centre, from where he now runs his first gallery and its roster of eight artists, which includes Danish painter Oliver Bak, who was recently snapped up by Sprüth Magers.

Lamb works with a close-knit set of mostly NY-based collectors; Portuguese buyers make up only around 10 to 15 percent of his client base. The local scene may be smaller, but he says the big players take it very seriously – “that sort of old-school, flaneur kind of client doesn’t really exist [here]”. Expats from the West Coast of the US are also helping ripen the local market, a lot of whom want to buy into “the European sensibility kind of thing”.

What makes Lisbon attractive, Lamb tells me, is less the market itself than the possibility of doing things differently. Cheaper rents allow for a slower programme than London would permit, one more responsive to artists’ needs and their aversion to hard deadlines. “The overheads are softer, so we can give the artists what they need – which only has a better outcome for the show. I’m really happy to have that sort of freedom,” he explains. So no regrets? “People have found the gallery much quicker than I thought they would. I had expected it to be much slower,” he admits. “The footfall I get here is stronger than when I worked in galleries in South London.” The journey times from London Gatwick to Lisbon and Mayfair to Peckham aren’t far off, to be fair.

For those greeting the newcomers, the story is a bit more complicated. Lisbon-born-and-bred artist Alexandre Estrela – who is representing Portugal at this year’s Venice Biennale – believes the hype has created what feels like two parallel artworlds. “It changed a lot – I don’t know if it’s for the worse or for the better,” he tells me from FarO, a self-funded project space he runs with Ana Baliza (who is also cocurator of the Venice pavilion). “It was more integrated before,” he continues. “Most people are here for short periods, they get their salaries from abroad; as nomads, they have their own communities.”

Even if Lisbon’s existing art scene has always been energetic and fertile in both ambition and output, it has long operated under the radar. “And that creates difference. That isolation still continues, even if it doesn’t seem to be the case,” he adds. Have local artists at least seen a trickle-down effect from all the media hype and the state’s awakening to the economic power of the cultural dollar? “No,” Estrela replies flatly. “It’s worse – the rents skyrocketed. It was never easy and it continues.”

João Pinharanda, MAAT’s artistic director, agrees. Despite all the noise, Portuguese artists still struggle to break through. “In cultural terms we are very rich, but very unknown,” he tells me. “We are very individual… There is no school of Portuguese painting. It’s difficult to understand and sell Portuguese art.” Beyond the challenges of translating the culture’s inhomogeneities to foreign buyers, the issue is further compounded by “the Portuguese market [being] very weak. We have very good galleries but we don’t have strong galleries – those that can go to an auction and buy its own artists to raise or maintain their prices.” The artists that do make it onto the international scene largely leave Portugal to “do it alone”.

ARCOlisboa is working hard to remedy that. Fair director Maribel López sees plenty of reason to remain optimistic, noting that “the last two years have felt like a deeper connection with the city’s contemporary art scene, the new Lisboetas and younger audiences”.

Visitor numbers to this year’s edition, which includes 84 galleries from 18 countries, will be of particular interest following the recent drop in the VAT rate on the sale of artworks from 23 to 6 percent, which now puts Portugal on a par with France and Germany (Spanish galleries remain beholden to a rate of 21 percent). The government responded to campaigners EXHIBITIO – Associação Lusa de Galeristas late last year, who had warned that the previous rate would likely result in gallery closures and market stagnation.

Whitney McVeigh, Paths Converge, Infinite Strange Shapes, 2026 (installation view, Encounter, Lisbon). Photo: Photodocumenta. Courtesy Encounter

For London expat Alexander Caspari, founder of Encounter, which shares a building with Jahn und Jahn, the drop is “making a huge difference” at this year’s fair. “The mood is quite strong,” he continues. “I sold a big piece yesterday to a collector from Paris, and collectors from Belgium and the States have come in especially.” He’s noticing an increased footfall on the booth, which he attributes to the interest surrounding his (London-based) Portuguese artist Diogo Pimentão’s current solo presentation at CAM and inclusion in MAAT Central’s collection show.

The question isn’t whether Lisbon’s hype was false. As in any city, artists can often be an engine of gentrification and later its victim. Maybe the question is not what the scene can offer newcomers, but how those newcomers – arguably another type of nomad, chasing a postcard fantasy of escape, reinvention and quality of life – can help the scene find its place beyond Portugal.

Mingling with the guests at Ana Maria Maiolino’s exhibition preview at MAAT back in March, I was struck by how warm, unpretentious and and uncynical the crowd was, punters and patrons alike. Stepping back onto the riverside and feeling the sunshine hit my browbeaten face of distinct London pallor, I wondered if Portugal would take in one more Brit.