Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

Te llamo cuerpo [I Call You Body] is part of the exhibition series Territories in Transit / Solo Duo, a platform for exchange and visibility that connects artists from different institutional and geographical contexts. Each edition sets two artists in dialogue – one invited by a partner institution, one based in the Comunitat Valenciana – their exchange unfolding across two venues and two exhibition periods. This format encourages the cross-pollination of perspectives, languages and territories, building collaborative networks that extend the reach of contemporary artistic practice.

Te llamo cuerpo brings the artistic practices of Marco Giordano and Irene Grau into dialogue. At its heart lies the relationship and tension between the body and the more-than-human world – a broad horizon that takes in plant and mineral species alongside the infrastructures woven into our urban ecosystems. The exhibition title speaks to the act of recognising more-than-human elements, whether natural or artificial, as bodies – subjects with an essence of their own, with which we might enter into contact. Each artist approaches this relational dynamic through distinct positions, methods and techniques.

For Irene Grau, her own body is the medium through which she enters into dialogue with the natural landscape – traversing it, inhabiting it, drawing on it as raw material for a coherent artistic practice. Her works are often the outcome of performative actions: not simply traces or records of these processes, but systems in which natural matter becomes a vocabulary in conversation with the history of painting and landscape. In Marco Giordano’s practice, the body is never displayed but always implied. His work begins with word, sound and material, reassembling them into an intrinsically performative sculptural language, and frequently involves the recomposition and transformation of matter as an act that interrogates contemporary social phenomena – and the political frictions they reveal.

Te llamo cuerpo brings together existing works by both artists alongside new productions made specifically for the museum’s spaces, spanning painting, photography, sculpture and installation.

Irene Grau presents a selection of works from two series: brillo abrigo (2024) and A hierro (2023–2024). In the latter, Grau works outward from her own body towards nature, etching and staining canvases with rust and water. She uses physical force to drag the fabrics across the ground, turning grass into countless brushes that mark the surface – capturing the labour of miners at work. All that force is held in the surface of the work, alongside the delicacy of water. The landscape paints itself. Abrigo was made in the surroundings of Altamira and is rooted in two essential questions: the presence of water through movement, and the possibility of understanding oneself as a place of shelter. These series will be accompanied by a new production made from the dust generated in the manufacture of ceramic tiles in the Castellón area.

Marco Giordano constructs a new ecosystem by bringing different bodies of work into dialogue, with the large-scale sculptural installation Gridlocks (2026) as its centrepiece. These sculptures are composed of assemblages of aluminium, copper, fibreglass and plastic – the materials of energy infrastructure, bodies that are often invisible within our cities. Made from cabling salvaged during dismantling works in Glasgow, this series marks the first stage of a long-term inquiry into energy transition and the systems of production and extraction that underpin it.

Co-production:

Women completely dominate as a subject in the work of Julio González. This unprecedented selection from the IVAM collection on the subject is a testament to this. His work spans family portraits and portraits of women in modern life, academic and abstract nudes, real and idealised figures, historical and political allegories: all form part of González’s stylistic evolution from full to empty forms, from figuration to abstraction. His sculptures are also permeated with meaning. They reflect the emancipation of contemporary women and their transition from the private to the public sphere, from silence to speech.

This chronological and thematic presentation of the collection underscores the major stages of his evolution, linking life and creation, intimacy and history: his early professional models, portraits of his family, peasant and urban women, depictions of motherhood and women reading, realistic figures and idealized types, and almost abstract standing figures as well as political allegories.

Also noteworthy is his family environment and its influence on his sculpture, connected to the goldsmithing workshop of his aunts and his wife, as well as to the production of his own decorative objects, which in the 1920s and 30s were linked to the adornment of a new female form. Paying homage to the work of Julio González means remembering the three strong women who remained faithful to his memory: his daughter, the abstract artist Roberta González, whose work is still being studied outside the influence of her father, and her generous heirs, Carmen Martínez and Viviane Grimminger, who enriched the IVAM’s holdings with their donations.

What would happen if a museum allowed visitors to peer underground? What if, by pulling on a corner, a hidden, complex, and vibrant world emerged, normally relegated to invisibility? Radix suggests this possibility through an ecological fabulation that shifts the gaze toward the depths of history, culture, and the memories of the subsoil.

Tania Candiani’s project imagines a fictional biome inhabited by entities that oscillate between the scientific and the speculative, between the observable and the imagined. It is presented as an immersive installation conceived as a hybrid ecosystem, where living plants, blown-glass sculptures, suspended organisms, a root-tron (a device that allows observation of root growth), audiovisual projections in cross-dialogue, and an octophonic sound composition that envelops the space coexist. Each of these elements functions as a fragment of a larger, interdependent system, where the separation between the living and the inert is erased.

The exhibition space is architecturally transformed to adopt a smooth, radial geometry, inspired by the cross-section of a plant structure found in a book from the Botanical Garden of Valencia. This spatial configuration acts not merely as a container, but as a body in itself, an expanded anatomy that suggests the presence of an imagined plant, a possible life form that could belong—or have belonged—to the Valencian territory, but whose origin remains uncertain, suspended between botanical memory and science fiction.

In this sense, Radix does not seek to represent nature as we know it, but rather to speculate on its possible mutations, microworlds, and futures, inviting us to reconsider the boundaries between species, disciplines, and states of matter, as well as to reflect on the invisible forces that sustain life, fostering an awareness of the hidden networks both above and below ground.

COLLABORATOR:

Between 1870 and 1920, Valencia emerged as one of the most prolific and influential artistic centres of its time. A remarkable number of painters were born and trained in the city, although today only a small number are remembered – those known as the great masters of the Valencian School – despite the fact that many of them lived and worked outside their native city.

From this vast group of painters active in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we know the biographies of only a few. One of the recurring questions is how they managed to make a living in such a competitive environment, crowded with professional artists. For many, the solution was to seek opportunities in other cities and countries, particularly across Europe and America. Teaching became a professional path for a significant number of artists, yet the careers of many of them can be described as nothing short of heroic, especially when their livelihoods depended on commissions or on the sale of their works in the art market.

In such a creative context as that of Valencia, one might say that artistic vocation was, in some cases, akin to a genetic trait, easily transmitted from parents to children. The Pinazo family is a notable example, alongside other artistic dynasties in the city such as the Capuz, López, Benlliure, Sorolla or Manaut Viglietti families, among others.

Within this phenomenon of professional transmission, there exists a practical dimension, a continuity or inheritance of tradition, and likewise a vocation. Early exposure to artistic practice fosters a familiarity that encourages the continuation of the craft – something clearly demonstrated by the Pinazo clan presented here. The great master Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench (1849–1916) had two sons who pursued an artistic career: José and Ignacio Pinazo Martínez. The former was a painter and the latter a sculptor, although he also painted and pursued a career as a singer. Although Ignacio Pinazo Martínez is an outstanding sculptor, the decision has been taken here to present the work of Marisa Pinazo Mitjans (1912-1990), daughter of José Pinazo Martínez (1879-1933), as she represents the continuation of painting within the family’s third generation.

To confront – or to display sequentially – the art of three generations we must interpret the connections that bind them, the gradual evolution of each artist, as well as the continuities that are naturally more pronounced between father and son than between grandfather and granddaughter. Although the powerful personality of the grandfather remains an object of admiration, each artist’s work follows its own path. The creations of the three reveal a gradual surpassing of established models and a series of stylistic developments which, taken together, offer a compelling journey that leads from Naturalism and Modernism to Art Deco.

The stimuli exerted by paternal models across generations give rise to affinities and links that can be clearly detected between the works of Ignacio Pinazo and José Pinazo in his early phase, just as they appear between certain paintings by Marisa Pinazo and works by José Pinazo. A concise selection and juxtaposition of works in different genres allow these correspondences to be appreciated with clarity.

L’Albufera. Visió tangencial (1985), a photographic project promoted by the regional government’s Department of Culture, entered the IVAM collection in 1986. In this commissioned project twelve selected participants — Derek Bennett, Diana Blok, Gabriel Cualladó, Vicente del Amo, Joan Fontcuberta, John Goto, Andreas Müller-Pohle, Rafael Navarro, Paulo Nozolino, Humberto Rivas, Philippe Salaün and Manuel Úbeda — were invited to work in and around the Albufera, the freshwater lagoon just outside the city of Valencia, with the freedom to choose whatever they wished and no other mandate than to take photographs of the place.

The current exhibition project wishes to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the designation of the Albufera as a Natural Park while at once proposing a reading of the territory from Jeff Kelley’s concept of place. This concept develops the idea of the Albufera as not merely a physical and geographical space, but also as a place shaped by historical, political, social, economic, cultural, and other circumstances which, like layered strata, have shaped and continue to shape the construction of this place, encouraging new interpretations and giving different meanings to the territory.

For this reason, this exhibition project intends to deconstruct and analyse Albufera, to lend visibility to the layers that form it and the forces at work within it. The approach will be based on a combination of artworks, artistic projects and documentation covering the whole of the twentieth century up until the present day. The exhibition features works by artists such as Sorolla, Gustave Doré, and María Dolores Casanova, among others. To borrow the words of Anna Tsing, the Albufera becomes a dance floor where dances respond to different lives, communities, and practices intertwine.

In this project, the museum follows a working method in which the museum becomes a proactive agent, encouraging processes of dialogue with the participating artists and activating a museum practice that intervenes, proposes and produces; so, the museum is more than a mere repository of heritage. The goal is to develop new narratives around the tangible and intangible heritage of such a complex natural environment as the Albufera through specifics artistics projects made by Bleda y Rosa, Teresa Marín, Paula García-Masedo, Jorge Yeregui, Lucía Loren and Jorge Ribalta, which will create a mesh with the rest of the artworks and documentation.

A media lumbre, (Half light), brings together proposals that, from contemporary artistic practices, open up spaces for materials that, until recently, have remained hierarchised within subordinate perimeters: ceramics, clay, wool, textiles, embroidery, esparto grass, palm, wicker and other natural fibres. These materials also include sounds and silences. The voice is present, reclaiming oral tradition as a vehicle for memory, as in the ancient filandones, those night-time gatherings around the hearth, while performing manual tasks in the warmth of the shared fire. Through the pieces and their different materials, we approach non-hegemonic knowledge associated with the territories: crafts, trades and traditions linked to the land. Safeguarding vernacular knowledge means preserving not only techniques and manufacturing, but also an intangible heritage composed of oral traditions, memories, popular knowledge and collective affections. A heritage lit by half-light, to the slow rhythm of shared gestures and legacies.

List of artists:

Ana Laura Aláez

Pilar Albarracín

Javier Bravo

Saskia Calderón

Susana Cámara Leret

Ricardo Calero

Ana Esteve Llorens

Antonio Fernández Alvira

Marta Font

Julie C. Fortier

Josefina Guilisasti

Noemi Iglesias Barrios

Mónica Jover

Cecilia Jurado Chueca

Glenda León

Sandra Mar

Adriana Meunié

Sonia Navarro

Lara Ordóñez

Nuria Riaza

Belén Rodriguez

Laura Segura

Isabel Servera

Laurita Siles

Jessica Stockholder

Sarah Viguer

Concha Ybarra

Opening and Closing Dates:

IVAM, Valencia: February 18 – June 14, 2026

Casal Solleric/Es Baluard, Palma de Mallorca: July – September, 2026

Center for Art and Nature, CDAN, Huesca: October – December, 2026

Museu Terra, L’Espluga de Francolí, Tarragona: October – December, 2026

A project by IVAM in collaboration with Casal Solleric, Es Baluard, CDAN, and Museu Terra

Entre el faro y el abismo [Between the Lighthouse and the Abyss] is part of the exhibition series Territories in Transit / Solo Duo, a platform for exchange and visibility that connects artists from different institutional and geographical contexts. Each edition sets two artists in dialogue – one invited by a partner institution, one based in the Comunitat Valenciana – their exchange unfolding across two venues and two exhibition periods. This format encourages the cross-pollination of perspectives, languages and territories, building collaborative networks that extend the reach of contemporary artistic practice.

This exhibition invites us to think of the sea not as a boundary, but as a territory: a living, ever-changing body where cartography dissolves and borders are defined not by fixed lines, but by currents, tides and temporal rhythms. Far from a mere liquid horizon, the sea appears as an unstable geography – a space that cannot be walked upon, yet sustains the movement of bodies, memories and materials.

In this inversion of perspective, the liquid becomes the norm and the solid the exception. Blue is no longer a background, but a structure; the terrestrial ceases to occupy the centre. From this logic, the sea stops being landscape or romantic metaphor and becomes a contemporary territory, charged with political, historical, aesthetic and affective dimensions.

The works of Mar Guerrero and Anna Talens inhabit this threshold, where the sea is understood not only as nature, but as an archive of experiences and resonances.

Mar Guerrero works with residual materials from the ocean – eroded plastics, driftwood – which she collects and transforms into sculptural objects. In her hands, these remnants cease to be waste and become witnesses to transit, pollution and resistance. Each piece retains the memory of its marine journey, proposing an aesthetic where beauty emerges from what is discarded, inviting reflection on our relationship with the environment.

Anna Talens, by contrast, approaches the horizon as a perceptual and spiritual experience. Her works explore the boundary between the visible and the invisible, between what expands and what fades. In her practice, the horizon is not a vanishing point, but a moving presence that structures the gaze and embodies the possibility of the unattainable.

Both artists inhabit the fold between the material and the immaterial, between the terrestrial and the abyssal. The sea becomes mirror and threshold: a surface of transit and a space of symbolic depth. Before it, the gaze does not shrink; it opens. This exhibition invites viewers to dwell in that ambiguity, recognising in the unfathomable sea the possibility of imagining new ways of being and seeing the world.

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