Silver Paintings Series 

The Silver Paintings comprise two hundred works, each ninety by two hundred centimeters, created during thirteen years of collaboration with Zaha Hadid. Conceived and executed entirely by de Campos, the series takes its name from the mirror-like metallized polyester surfaces coated with gelatin, which absorbed ink, acrylic, and at times unconventional materials such as coffee or wine.

The works took shape through a long process of trial and persistence. For more than a year, de Campos tested materials and surfaces before the language of the paintings emerged. Exhibitions of the early studies allowed him to refine the approach. In 2004, following Zaha Hadid’s Pritzker Prize, she saw the series presented as a complete ensemble at Kenny Schachter’s Rove Gallery on Britannia Street, London. Only then did she fully embrace the project, which was met with wide acclaim.

The Silver Paintings are both artworks and records of a period of extraordinary invention at Zaha Hadid Architects in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when digital tools began to open new ways of imagining form. Many of the projects from that period were never built, but in these works they found another life, fluid and speculative, alive with shifting light. Over the years, the series has been shown in museums and galleries across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. It remains a testimony to de Campos’s material experimentation and to a creative dialogue with Hadid that lasted until her passing in 2016.

THE SILVER PAINTINGS exhibited at the Buchmann Galerie-Berlin, Guggenheim Museum New York, Chanel Pavilion at the IMA-Paris, Artist's studio