Marta Palau: My Paths are Earthly

At different periods throughout her life, in interviews and in her notebooks, Marta Palau i Bosch (Albesa, Lleida, 1934–Mexico City, 2022) stated that “art is magic and freedom”. This exhibition is based on a conceptual framework stemming from the dialogue between magic and history. This was—inherited from some of the theorists and theosophists of the late nineteenth century—, and is structured around the core concepts of land and body. Both are understood as places where magic and history appear, a worldview that oscillates between life and death, between Eros and Thanatos, from a cyclical organic perspective, appealing directly to the changing course of history. A land understood from expulsion and exile, but also as fertile, life-generating matter. Just like the body, matter gets sick, dies, retains scars, not only physical, and at the same time engenders life, transforming the present and manifesting, through artistic practice, struggle and resistance.

The multidisciplinary creations of Marta Palau span a wide range of languages, fusing artistic and ancestral techniques, and also raise questions linked to territory, exile and migration, highlighting their importance due to the fact that they are, from one perspective, autobiographical, and from another, closely related to present-day conflicts. Her works perforate our the present, calling attention to many of the social and political wounds that characterise our contemporaneity, in a profound way, these originate in her own experience of exile—as a result of the Franco dictatorship—, a condition that further unfolds from her familial experience of living near the border in Tijuana.

The ensemble is presented as a network of bodies/works structured around two main axes that cohabit from their opposites: the idea of ​​land linked to exile and reception, understood as wound or scar, and the idea of ​​body, which embraces the migrant’s pain and loss, but also healing and the possibility of generating life. It is interesting to note how, for Palau, everything is filtered from her own biography, an experience that expands and remains valid through the conflicts that characterise our contemporaneity, as well as its possibilities for transformation. In the curator’s words, “in the artist’s work, there coexists a holistic vision of the world and history, a telluric conception of an understanding of magic as an indispensable ally of an art action that becomes resistance and defence”.

The Museu Tàpies presents in Barcelona Marta Palau. My Paths Are Earthly, the artist’s first major international exhibition since her death. Curated by Imma Prieto, Director of the Museu Tàpies, the show includes drawing, painting and several large textile installations, in dialogue with objects and materials from her personal archive, never previously shown. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that includes the research conducted on the artist for this occasion, as well as on her social and political context. The exhibition is co-produced by the Museu Tàpies and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo UNAM, Mexico, where the show will be presented in autumn 2025.