Collecting art is not only about what hangs on a wall. It is about the stories, memories and feelings that become part of a home, and the connection that develops when a work continues to reveal itself over time.
Sometimes it is colour. Sometimes it is a story. Sometimes a work creates an immediate emotional response, and sometimes the connection develops more slowly, as an image or object begins to reveal itself through repeated looking.
That is part of what makes living with art different from simply seeing it in an exhibition.
A work enters the rhythm of daily life. It is encountered in different light, from different angles and at different moments. Over time, the story behind the work can become part of the story of the home itself.
With the finalists of the 2026 Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize now revealed, the shortlist offers 31 very different examples of what that relationship might look like, spanning painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, installation and mixed media.
It begins in the studio
Every artwork arrives with a story already attached, and knowing a little of it is often where a connection starts.
Fábio Colaço’s Untitled (veiled Pope) began with a viral image of Pope Francis, his face covered by his own vestment. Millions of people scrolled past it in seconds. Colaço stopped, and turned that fleeting internet moment into a small oil painting, giving it the slowness and weight that only paint can.
Instantly recognisable but slightly strange, it is the kind of work that keeps asking questions. On the wall of a study or a hallway, an image that once vanished in a feed becomes one that is looked at every day, and the starting point for conversations with friends and family. Over time, the artist’s question becomes its owner’s too.
Artwork credit: Untitled (veiled Pope) by Fábio Colaço
Beatriz Narciso found her story somewhere most of us would hurry through. Quem fica é quem perde captures the corner of a bar bathroom after the energy of the night has passed, with small details hinting at the people who were there before. Narciso won the inaugural WAF – Women in Art Fellowship in 2025 and has since presented her winning project in the solo exhibition Sótão at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes.
The night in the painting belongs to strangers, yet almost everyone has a version of it: the friends, the city at three in the morning, the moment the music stops. Live with a work like this and it slowly gathers your own memories alongside the ones it was made with.
Artwork credit: Quem fica é quem perde (Those who stay are the ones who lose) by Beatriz Narciso
Why this one?
Ask people why they bought a particular work and the answer is rarely about investment. More often it is “I kept coming back to it” or “I couldn’t stop thinking about it”. There is no single way to choose art, but there is usually a moment when a work stops being something you are looking at and becomes something you want to keep.
Sometimes the first connection is colour, but colour is rarely the whole story. Bettina Vaz Guimarães’ Arquitetura do Acaso (Architecture of Chance) uses bold colour and overlapping shapes to build an abstract architectural scene that feels structured but playful. Its title holds a tension the painting keeps in balance: order and accident, what is planned and what simply happens. The colour may be what draws someone in, but living with the work, it can come to read as a reflection on how the spaces we live in, and the lives we build inside them, are shaped as much by chance as by design.
Artwork credit: Arquitetura do Acaso (1) by Bettina Vaz Guimarães
Sometimes the connection is physical. Evy Jokhova’s Roman Mother is a glazed ceramic form, bold, tactile and slightly unexpected, with its vivid colour and rounded shape giving it a strong presence. Its title alone opens a door: a mother, an ancient form, something handed down.
Unlike a painting, it changes as you move around it, and it invites being touched as much as looked at. Objects like this have a way of becoming fixtures of family life. Years from now, it might be the piece the children remember from the home they grew up in, part of the story of that house as much as the story of the artist.
Artwork credit: Roman Mother by Evy Jokhova
A story that grows with you
A painting does not change once it leaves the studio, but the person looking at it does. That is one of the quiet pleasures of living with art.
Gabriel Garcia’s The Art of Not Yielding brings four women together around a seated figure in a scene of care and support. Their gestures suggest a moment of recovery, while details such as the mirror and discarded boots hint at reflection, vulnerability and the possibility of moving forward. Garcia sees painting and storytelling as closely connected, and the scene gives the viewer enough to begin forming their own interpretation without explaining everything.
Someone might choose it because it reminds them of the friends who carried them through a difficult year. A decade later, it might speak to them about caring for someone else. The work stays the same; its meaning moves with the life around it.
Sónia Apolónia’s Above The Noise, India II works in a quieter way. The photograph isolates a single urban structure against deep black, turning something that might normally be overlooked into something almost sculptural.
Live with it long enough and it begins to change how you see your own surroundings. A water tank on a Lisbon rooftop, scaffolding on a street you walk every day, the outline of a building at dusk: the habit of attention the photograph teaches follows its owner out of the door. Perhaps that is the clearest sign a work has become part of someone’s story. It no longer simply hangs in their home; it shapes how they look at the world.
Artwork credit: Above The Noise, India II by Sónia Apolónia
Where your story begins
For people who have never bought original contemporary art, the idea of becoming a collector can sound more intimidating than it needs to be.
A collection does not have to begin with expertise, a particular budget or a plan. It can begin with one work that creates a strong enough connection that the idea of leaving it behind feels harder than the idea of taking it home.
The finalist selection includes works at a broad range of prices and across very different scales and media. Each one comes with an artist at a significant point in their professional practice, and with the thinking and experience behind what they make: the beginning of a story that the right person can carry on.
Through the Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize, every direct artwork sale also has a wider impact. Half of the sale supports the artist, while the other half funds the Sovereign Art Foundation’s therapist-led expressive arts programmes for children and young people in Lisbon, Estremoz and the Algarve.
So the story of a work does not end when it leaves the exhibition.
It continues with the artist whose practice it supports, with the children who benefit from the Foundation’s programmes, and with the person who chooses to give it a place in their home.
A work of art can begin with one story and, over time, become part of another.
Main image artwork credit: The Art of Not Yielding by Gabriel Garcia
View the works in The 2026 Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize
https://www.sovereignartfoundation.com/the-sovereign-portuguese-art-prize/
Find out more about the Sovereign Art Foundation’s work in Portugal:
https://www.sovereignartfoundation.com/expressive-arts-programme-portugal/
Vote online and explore the shortlisted Student Prize artworks:
https://www.sovereignartfoundation.com/sp-portugal/
Follow SAF Portugal on Instagram:
@sovereignartfoundationportugal @sovereignportugueseartprize
Sovereign Art Foundation Portugal
📧 Tanya@sovereignartfoundation.com
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The views expressed on this page are those of the author and not of The Portugal News.