Abigail Lazkoz: Lamb, Half Cat, Almost Dog

Azkuna Zentroa—Alhóndiga Bilbao, Bilbao City Council Society and Contemporary Culture Centre, presents Lamb, Half Cat, Almost Dog by artist Abigail Lazkoz (Bilbao, 1972). Lazkoz is one of the most recognised Spanish artists of her generation, whose work explores expanded drawing in dialogue with painting, sculpture and architecture.  

Abigail Lazkoz’s practice addresses issues of identity, memory, symbolic violence, the architecture of power and the tensions between the individual and the collective, often through large-scale black-and-white wall installations that combine references to comics, popular culture and recent political history. 

Curated by Yara Sonseca, the project includes expanded works created by revisiting and rearranging existing pieces, combining them with new or previously unseen work. In coproduction with DA2 Domus Artium 2002, the exhibition reimagines and expands on the project that began in Salamanca in 2025 with I Have a Unique Animal. 

In its first iteration, the exhibition took its title from the opening words of A Crossbreed, a short story written by Franz Kafka in 1917. The story describes this unique animal as a fantastical creature, half lamb and half cat. In a similar way, Lazkoz made hybridity, or the mixing of forms, the unifying theme of the aesthetic syntheses that filled the galleries at DA2. At Azkuna Zentroa—Alhóndiga Bilbao, the artist takes this narrative a step further by exploring otherness within her own practice. Her intention is not to present it as a seamless, fluid whole, but to affirm the value of its complexity, embracing—as Kafka’s story does—the languor and tender bewilderment of being a “crossbreed”.   

The result is less a conventional retrospective than a fresh perspective on Abigail Lazkoz’s artistic practice, in which Kafka’s fantastical crossbreed becomes a metaphor for her creative process and an artistic practice shaped by the interplay and tension between seemingly opposing elements: small and large, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, full and empty. 

Yet Lamb, Half Cat, Almost Dog goes beyond the idea of bringing two opposites together. The animal’s desire to also be a dog introduces a third possibility, resisting any attempt to confine it to a fixed identity. In this way, Lazkoz moves beyond the categories that have defined her work over the years, exploring other possibilities and affirming the complexity of her practice. 

Abigail Lazkoz
Abigail Lazkoz (Bilbao, 1972) is one of the most renowned Spanish artists of her generation within the field of expanded drawing, a practice that places drawing in dialogue with painting, sculpture, and architecture. 

Trained in Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country and subsequently a researcher and teacher at the same institution, she has conducted a decisive part of her international career between New York and Europe, exhibiting at some of the most significant contemporary art institutions both nationally and internationally. Some of her more renowned projects include her participation in Greater New York at the MoMA PS1 (New York), The Drawing Center exhibitions and Queens Museum, as well as solo exhibitions at the Joan Miró Foundation, MARCO (Vigo), the ABC Museum, and the CAB (Burgos). 

Her works form part of major public collections, including the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum; the Artium Museoa collection; the collections of Queens Museum and the MoMA PS1 institutional sphere; as well as collections linked to MUSAC, BilbaoArte, and other Spanish public institutions. Lazkoz is represented by the Marzana Gallery (Bilbao). 

Azkuna Zentroa—Alhóndiga Bilbao. Bilbao Society and Contemporary Culture Centre
Azkuna Zentroa is the Bilbao Society and Contemporary Culture Centre, with a local and international perspective open to dialogue with different community groups. A place to take part in culture as a practice, process and space for experiences, through four lines of programming: Visual arts, Performing Arts, Film and Audio-visuals, and Literature. These lines dialogue among themselves generating a hybrid, multiple and expanded programming. Always with education as a way to generate critical knowledge and transform society through art and artists.