Pedro Cabrita Reis was born in Lisbon in 1956, where he studied Fine Arts and edited the influential magazine Arte Opinião until 1982. Even then, his work was characterised by its great formal diversity and highly conceptual anchoring. From 1992, he exhibited at the Documenta in Kassel, before multiplying his exhibitions on the international circuit, notably in Venice, where he participated several times in the Biennale, and represented his country in 2003. 

At the Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale in 2009, his two installations in the Bichat warehouse combining neon lights and young tree shoots were very well received. A member of the Collège international de Philosophie de Paris and the London Architecture Foundation, his demanding work is characterised by great intellectual rigour. Highly recognisable, with his impeccable suits and eternal cigar in his mouth, he is also a collector, and has appeared in many Portuguese films. 

Pedro Cabrita Reis' work is characterised by a constant dialogue between modern architecture and nature. Drawing inspiration from everyday objects, his earliest pieces are on the borderline between a ready-made and a very minimalist approach. Working with industrial building materials (bricks, cement, planks, etc.), or with found objects, his sculptures tend to deconstruct and simplify spaces in an attempt to recover their original principles. He thus questions the way in which the memory of past actions is inscribed in places, creating site-specific proposals, as during his first travelling retrospective, from 2009 to 2011, which saw his work exhibited successively at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the M-Museum in Louvain, and the Carré d'Art in Nîmes. 

In 2018, commissioned by the MUCEM (Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée), he erected several hundred concrete, iron and wood structures on the Place d'Armes of Fort Saint-Jean, facing the sea, in Marseille. The ensemble evokes a petrified forest, or a mineral crowd, in dialogue with the urban space and the surrounding landscape. As is often the case, with The Forest (Marseille), Pedro Cabrita Reis strips down the structures, experiments with light effects and deconstructs the notions of building and city in order to achieve a purity, halfway between autobiography and a more self-reflexive approach to museum practice. The exhibition also gave rise to the publication of a catalogue in which the artist talks to patients from the psychiatric hospital in Lisbon, where he presented Foresta, the counterpart to his installation in Marseille.