Carving portraits out of walls
Vhils – Alexandre Manuel Dias Farto – is a Portuguese street artist born in 1987 near Lisbon.
He studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and nowadays lives and works between London and Lisbon. He is best known for his unique technique in urban art: carving portraits out of the city.
He began as a teenager with conventional graffiti and around 2011 developed the low-relief carving method that made his name. Using chisels, drills and jigsaws, he strips layers of plaster and paint on aging walls to reveal striking human portraits hidden beneath the surface.
The result looks almost archaeological, as if the face had always been there, waiting to be discovered rather than added. His subjects are typically ordinary and anonymous people rather than celebrities, reflecting his fascination with the neglected lives embedded in a city.
He gained international attention when his work of a face carved into a wall appeared alongside a piece by Banksy at the Cans Festival in London in 2008. Since then he has taken his art global, working across Europe, Asia and the Americas. He treats destruction as a creative process rather than an act of vandalism.
Vhils’ art engages with themes of urbanisation and globalisation, often responding to the specific history of a place. In Brussels, he created a mural blending imaginary from several European democratic revolutions, including Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, as a response to the far right. He has also expanded beyond walls into new materials – in a 2022 solo exhibition in Seville, he presented tile-based pieces for the first time, and more recently produced large sculptural works.
His achievements have been widely recognized in Portugal and abroad. A major retrospective – ‘Strata’ – at Munich’s Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (Strata) traced his artistic evolution from 2005 to 2025 across a range of materials and techniques. In 2023, the Boutique Hotel ‘Artsy Cascais’ was inaugurated with a facade designed by the artist.
This year, Lisbon’s MUDE Design museum marked 20 years of his career with an exhibition of his most famous editions. His work also appeared in institutional spaces once considered untouchable by street art, including a mural for UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
Today, Vhils stands as one of the most distinctive figures in urban art, an artist who doesn’t add to the city’s surface – like his contemporary Bordalo II – but excavates it.
By the way, do you know that Lusolobo is turning 10 this month?
The first blog – in Dutch – was published on October 28, 2016 and called ‘ huurders’ (tenants).
An issue that is even more relevant today as it was ten years ago.
Enjoy your week Aproveite a semana (pic wikimedcom)
