Vhils

VHILS, whose real name is Alexandre Farto, is a Portuguese contemporary artist born in Lisbon in 1987 and raised in Seixal, an industrial suburb across the river from the Portuguese capital. He discovered graffiti in his early teens and quickly developed a fascination with walls, the traces left by time and the constant transformation of the urban landscape. He later pursued his artistic education in London at University of the Arts London, within Central Saint Martins.

His practice is built around a gesture that has become his signature: removing material in order to reveal an image. In contrast with traditional graffiti, which adds paint and color to a surface, Vhils carves, scratches, cuts and erodes walls to expose the layers hidden beneath them. Chisels, hammers, power tools, corrosive substances and even controlled explosives become creative instruments from which his monumental portraits emerge, as though the faces had always been embedded within the architecture.

This innovative technique, developed notably through his Scratching the Surface project, brought him international recognition at London's Cans Festival in 2008, where one of his carved portraits appeared alongside a work by Banksy. Images of the two interventions helped introduce Vhils' distinctive visual language to an international audience.

Vhils' practice has since expanded far beyond the urban wall. Paper, wood, metal, advertising posters, discarded doors, video, light and large-scale installations have become part of an increasingly multidisciplinary body of work. On paper, for example, he uses corrosive substances to remove ink and gradually reveal an image, translating the same subtractive principle that defines his monumental interventions into a more intimate format.

At the heart of his work lies an exploration of memory, identity and urban transformation. The layers he removes become traces of successive histories: those of buildings, neighborhoods and, above all, the people who inhabit them. His portraits of anonymous individuals place the human figure back at the center of cities shaped by globalization, rapid development and cultural homogenization. For Vhils, destroying the surface paradoxically becomes a way of revealing what lies beneath it.

His distinctive approach has led to projects and exhibitions around the world. Recent institutional presentations include Prisma at MAAT in Lisbon in 2022, Multitude at MIMA in Brussels in 2024 and Strata at MUCA – Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art in Munich in 2025. From his origins in graffiti to his current multidisciplinary practice, Vhils has established a visual language that has become one of the most recognizable within contemporary urban art.

Discover Vhils artworks available at Galerie De Medicis, Place des Vosges in Paris, and explore the Portuguese artist's distinctive universe through a selection of works combining portraiture, material and urban memory.