Exhibition highlights 2022

Ellen Gallagher with Edgar Cleijne
April–September 2022, Room 2 

Curators: Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Director of Exhibitions and the Collection of the Centro Botín; Benjamin Weil, Director of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian’s Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão.

The first exhibition in Spain by Ellen Gallagher (Providence, Rhode Island, 1965) will span two decades and feature three of the collaborative film installations she has made with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne (Eindhoven, Netherlands, 1963).  An immersive itinerary that recalibrates the tensions between fiction and reality, it will explore issues of race, identity, and transformation, with reference to historical and contemporary themes that include Modernist abstraction, marine biology, and Black popular culture. 

In Gallagher´s ongoing series of works on paper she started in 2001 entitled Watery Ecstatic, the artist creates a new natural history of complex biomorphic forms associated with Drexciya, a mythical underwater realm engaging with the afterlife of the Atlantic slave trade. Completing the exhibition are three film installations produced by the two artists, including Osedax, a celluloid narrative centred on whale fall, a scientific term for cetacean carcasses that have descended to the abyssal zones, where they are consumed by scavengers.

Juan Muñoz: Drawings 1988-2000, a retrospective
June 25–October 16, 2022, Room 1

Curator: Dieter Schwarz, author and specialist in modern and contemporary art.

In the context of the European art of the 1980s and 1990s, Juan Muñoz produced an exceptional body of work as a draftsman during his brief career. Although his output in this medium was extensive, drawing was not an activity to which he constantly dedicated himself; rather, he used it for certain purposes and moments of his work. This being so, his style changed quite radically, from simple sketches to meticulously executed plates, from freehand drawings to works based on images projected on paper. Some of his drawings would become part of a sculptural work, while others were conceived as literary illustrations, but they could also take the form of autonomous creations with which he created highly metaphorical images. In this exhibition, the Centro Botín will bring together more than two hundred works by Juan Muñoz, presenting for the first time an overview of his graphic production thanks to loans from institutions and collections in Europe and the United States and, above all, from the Estate of Juan Muñoz.

Damián Ortega 
October 15, 2022 to March 5, 2023, Room 2
Curator: Vicente Todolí, Chair of the Fundación Botín’s Visual Arts Advisory Committee

With wit and humour, Damián Ortega (Mexico City, 1967) deconstructs familiar objects and processes by altering their functions and transforming them into novel experiences and hypothetical situations. His work applies the concepts of physics to human interactions, with chaos, accidents and instability producing a system of relationships in continual flux. The artist explores the tension that exists inside each object, focusing on it, rearranging it, scrutinising it and inverting its logic to bring out an infinite inner world. The result of this research reveals the interdependence of various sets of components, be it within a social system or a complex machine.

Itinerarios XXVII
November 19, 2022 through the first semester of 2023, Room 1

Itinerarios XXVII will bring together the projects by the recipients of the 27th Fundación Botín Visual Arts Grants: Armando Andrade Tudela (Lima, Peru, 1975), Gruber Assaf (Jerusalem, Israel, 1980), Lucía Bayón (Madrid, 1994), Alfonso Borragán (Santander, 1983), Gonzalo Elvira (Neuquén, Patagonia Argentina, 1971), Seila Fernández Arconada (Santander, 1986), Joan Morey (Balearic Islands, 1972) and Ana Santos (Espinho, Portugal, 1982).

For further press information and images please contact:
Fundación Botín, María Cagigas: mcagigas [​at​] fundacionbotin.org / T +34 942 22 60 72