What happens when the gallery stops being only a place of display and becomes a place of making?
With The Studio, Underdogs Gallery opens the door to the usually hidden rhythm of artistic practice: sketches, gestures, doubts, repetitions, decisions, and the quiet tension between idea and final work. Across five weeks, Pedrita Studio, Tamara Alves, Nuno Viegas, ±MaisMenos±, and Wasted Rita each took over the gallery for a week each, transforming it into a temporary studio before the accumulated works came together as a group exhibition on 15–16 May 2026.
There is something quietly magnetic about entering a space before everything is finished.
Before the final lighting, before the work settles into its official form, there is another kind of exhibition happening: the one made of process. The open sketchbook. The repeated gesture. The unfinished line. The hesitation before a decision becomes visible.
With The Studio, Underdogs Gallery turns that invisible part of artistic practice into the center of the project. Presented as Residencies + Group Exhibition, the initiative invited five artists — Pedrita Studio, Tamara Alves, Nuno Viegas, ±MaisMenos±, and Wasted Rita — to each take over the gallery for one week, transforming it into a temporary studio.
Instead of presenting art only as a final result, The Studio gives visibility to what usually stays behind the scenes: sketches, doubts, repetitions, gestures, and the small decisions that shape a body of work. It invites the public to look at creation not as a polished endpoint, but as a living sequence of attempts, instincts, corrections, and discoveries.
At the center of the project is a simple but generous idea: each artist is invited to work on paper. Paper appears here not as a secondary medium, but as a place of possibility. It can hold the first movement of an idea, a return to something intimate, or the beginning of a new direction. It is immediate, physical, exposed. It carries traces of thought in a way that feels close to the hand, close to the moment, close to the artist.
That evolving structure is what makes The Studio feel culturally relevant. It is not only an exhibition, and not only a residency. It sits somewhere between studio visit, open process, collective installation, and public encounter. The project gives the audience access to the making of the work while also allowing the artists to respond to each other across time.
The selected artists bring together different visual languages, each with a strong connection to contemporary urban-inspired practice. Pedrita Studio, represented through Rita João, brings a design-led sensitivity where memory, material culture, and visual systems often intersect. Tamara Alves carries an emotionally charged visual universe, where bodies, instinct, and intensity move through drawing and painting. Nuno Viegas is known for a clean yet layered visual language connected to graffiti culture, identity, and the figure of the masked creator. ±MaisMenos± brings a sharp, conceptual, politically aware approach, turning symbols and language into acts of friction. Wasted Rita works with text, attitude, irony, and emotional precision, cutting through contemporary noise with a voice that is direct, poetic, and uncomfortable in the best way.
Together, they create a kind of temporary ecosystem. Not a traditional group show where finished works simply share a room, but a space where practices cross, accumulate, and quietly speak to each other.
There is also something important in the way The Studio reflects Underdogs’ broader role in Lisbon’s cultural landscape. The platform has long positioned itself between gallery, public art programme, artist editions, and commissioned projects, working with artists connected to urban-inspired contemporary art and building bridges between creators, the public, and the city.
In that sense, The Studio feels like a natural extension of this mission. It keeps the spirit of street culture, experimentation, and visual immediacy, while giving the public a closer look at how artistic language is built.
For Disrupt Platform, this is the kind of format worth paying attention to: one that does not simply display culture, but reveals how culture is made. It supports creative projects, artistic interventions, and the people willing to challenge the ordinary through practice, risk, and visual expression.
By the time the final group exhibition opened on 15 and 16 May, the gallery had already lived many lives. It had been a workspace, a meeting point, a surface for experimentation, and a quiet archive of decisions. The final exhibition was not just the result of five residencies. It was the trace of a process made public.
And perhaps that is the strongest gesture of The Studio: it reminds us that art is not only what arrives finished on the wall. It is also what happens before — the movement, the doubt, the repetition, the courage to begin again.
