Underdogs celebrates the 25th of April with the launch of a special series of editions by seven Portuguese artists who, although they did not experience the revolution firsthand, grew up with its legacy deeply embedded in the fabric of society. This year marks 51 years since the Carnation Revolution — a historical moment that ended decades of dictatorship and restored democracy in Portugal. The works emerged from an invitation by Underdogs to engage in a dialogue with iconic photographs by Alfredo Cunha — one of Portugal’s most important photojournalists. With a sharp and sensitive eye, Cunha captured defining moments of April 25, 1974, immortalising expressions of freedom, confrontation, silence, and hope.

Each artist was invited to choose, reflect on, and respond to one of these images, inviting viewers to step into a portal through time and offering a new, personal reading of the past. Originally presented in the exhibition Portais do Tempo, held at the former Lisnave shipyards in Almada in 2023, these powerful works are now being relaunched as limited editions — produced in the same format and with identical margins. Each edition will be sold at the same price, making them accessible to a wider audience and reaffirming the importance of keeping alive the reflection on what freedom means, and what it continues to mean, today.

Inês Teles departs from a historic photograph of Portugal’s transition out of dictatorship — tanks, crowds, and a moment of rupture. Yet her gaze shifts to the margins: a soft light, subtle movement, and the branches of a tree in the foreground. It is from this organic detail that she builds her sculptural response — a poetic glass form inspired by the concept of the Social Amoeba, a unicellular organism that unites for collective survival. Her delicate work reflects on the balance between individual and collective, and the need for resilience in uncertain times.

In the early days of graffiti, the ultimate flex in the scene had a name: wholetrain. To paint not just a single carriage but an entire moving vessel from end to end was a feat of scale, coordination, and audacity. Emerging in late-1970s New York, the wholetrain became a rite of passage: it was a moving celebration of collaboration between different artists, friendship, adrenaline, and sheer artistic nerve. When a wholetrain rolled into a station, everyone stopped. It was that powerful.

This spirit of collective creation, risk, and improvisation is the foundation of WHOLETRAINS, a project initiated by Alexandre Farto aka Vhils. He invited close friends, long-time collaborators, and some of the most important graffiti artists today — Barry McGee, OSGEMEOS, and Revok, who in different corners of the world, also grew up working on trains — to take this legendary spirit and twist it into something new. Instead of steel and subway tunnels, the structure unfolds on a long sheet of paper mapping the outline of a real train from Portugal’s Sintra Line.

Cadavre Exquis

In the WHOLETRAINS project, the raw energy of graffiti meets the Surrealists’ favourite game, the cadavre exquis: a chain-reaction artwork where each artist builds on what came before without ever seeing the whole picture. This concept served as inspiration for the project, shaping a seamless clash of styles that only collective creation can produce. And just like a train in motion, WHOLETRAINS keeps unfolding — opening the way for future collaborations and new carriages to come.

Collectible Carriages

Steering this project are none other than Barry McGee, OSGEMEOS, Revok, and Vhils — four artists who have defined entire chapters of graffiti and urban art across continents. Each takes on a carriage, turning the train into a moving constellation of styles, rhythms, and visual frequencies.

Together, they bring WHOLETRAINS to life with the force, velocity, and unpredictability that only decades of shared history can generate. Underdogs is proud to present this project with unique original works, individual editions available for separate acquisition, and full-train editions that unite all carriages into a single unfolding piece.

Judith Supine’s work has always hovered between delirium and clarity, seduction and discomfort. Known for his surreal collages that splice together fragments of the body, pop cultural debris, and dreamlike imagery, he constructs figures that feel both grotesque and hypnotic. In recalling a fever dream in the jungles between Costa Rica and Panama—hallucinating from dysentery as a Blue Morpho butterfly followed him down a dirt road—Supine describes a moment of fragility that turned into revelation, an overwhelming sense that everything would be okay. This vision encapsulates the tension at the core of his practice: the collision of beauty and decay, hallucination and prophecy, the unconscious erupting into form.