Lisbon’s art scene has never been shy, but this collaboration feels like a collision it wasn’t prepared for. Vhils and Joana Vasconcelos, two artists who couldn’t be more different in method, texture, and attitude, now appear side by side under the Under-Dogs banner. It’s the kind of pairing that makes you wonder why it didn’t happen sooner, and yet feels so unexpected that it lands like a cultural plot twist.
Subtitle for This Block
VHILS
Vhils has built a career on subtraction. His work is an act of removal, carving, drilling, blasting into urban surfaces, revealing faces and histories buried within the material of the city. He treats concrete like skin, facades like memory, walls like palimpsests. His art is quiet, surgical, and deeply rooted in place. When you stand in front of a Vhils piece, you feel the city breathing through it.
Joana Vasconcelos
Joana Vasconcelos operates at the opposite end of the spectrum. Her work is maximalist, performative, unapologetically ornate. She elevates the domestic into the monumental, twisting craft traditions into spectacle. Crochet becomes architecture. Porcelain becomes provocation. Chandelier becomes universe. She doesn’t carve things out, she adds, layers, embellishes, overwhelms. Her art insists on attention.
Putting these two forces in conversation is like pairing a scalpel with a firework. And somehow, it works.
The Collaboration
Underdogs frames the moment not as a merger but as an encounter: two distinct artistic languages speaking across the same space. The contrast becomes the point. Vhils’ restrained palette sits beside Vasconcelos’ exuberant colour. His raw textures amplify her polished surfaces. Her theatricality sharpens his quiet intensity. Instead of clashing, the works create a kind of compositional tension, a push and pull between absence and excess.
The pairing also says something about Lisbon right now. The city has entered a phase where heritage and reinvention run on parallel tracks. Street art lives alongside baroque ornamentation. Brutalist concrete intersects with pastel façades. Tradition sits next to experiment without apology. Vhils and Vasconcelos personify that duality. Two artists rooted in Portugal’s cultural fabric, yet consistently rewriting its boundaries.
What makes this collaboration compelling is not the novelty of seeing their work together, but the precision of the dialogue. Vhils exposes. Vasconcelos amplifies. One carves into history; the other expands it. Their coexistence creates a spectrum of Portuguese identity that feels broader, louder, more complex, and more honest.
In a world where artistic collaborations often feel like marketing exercises, this one feels necessary. It tells a story about material, memory, craft, and the city that shaped them. It bridges the austerity of the street with the ornamentation of domestic tradition. It places two artistic extremes side by side and lets them spark.
Lisbon didn’t expect this pairing. But it needed it.
If this is what happens when restraint meets exuberance, then the conversation is far from over.
Images © Underdogs Gallery