João Maria Gusmão (1979, Lisbon) and Pedro Paiva (1977, Lisbon) have graduated in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon and exhibited together since 2001. They were awarded the 2004 EDP New Artists Award, and represented Portugal at the 2009 Venice Biennale, curated by Natxo Checa. They held individual exhibitions at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham; at the Mercer Union Center for Contemporary Visual Art in Toronto; no Kunstverein Hannover; at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco; in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León, in Leon; at the Chiado Museum in Lisbon; at the Graça Brandão Gallery in Lisbon; among others. They also participated in several collective exhibitions, in Portugal and abroad, in which the 8th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea stand out; and the XXVII Biennial of São Paulo. His works are represented in the collections Tate Modern, MUDAM (Luxembourg), MUSAC, GAM (Bergamo), Serralves Foundation, Chiado Museum, among others.