Clear, Lucid, and Awake - Spanish Artists from the TBA21 Collection

To mark the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Spain and South Korea, a major exhibition of Spanish contemporary art opens at Art Sonje Center in Seoul this spring. Clear, Lucid, and Awake, curated by Chus Martínez and co-produced by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and Art Sonje Center, in collaboration with the Spanish Ministry of Culture, Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), AECID, and the Embassy of Spain in the Republic of Korea, brings together ten acclaimed Spanish artists whose works resonate across borders, cultures, and ecological urgencies. This exhibition constructs a dialogue between two nations that are geographically distant yet culturally resonant—both peninsulas with deep maritime histories, industrialized transitions, and complex relationships with their rural landscapes. Clear, Lucid, and Awake emphasizes common trajectories of modernization, ecological transformation, and cultural reinvention.

Spanning sculpture, video, installation, and performance, the exhibition presents a powerful portrait of Spain’s contemporary artistic landscape—while offering space for connection with Korean cultural experience.

Cristina Lucas, one of Spain’s most internationally recognized artists, contributes embroidered maps from her Tufting series. These works are visual counter-narratives that chart the scars of aerial warfare and ideological division—drawing a potent parallel between the legacies of the Spanish Civil War and the Korean War.

Regina de Miguel’s Nekya: A River Film, a 74-minute video commission by TBA21, immerses viewers in the mythologies and traumas of Spain’s Riotinto mining region—an otherworldly landscape that evokes both environmental degradation and resistance. Her installations explore speculative futures where extractivism shifts from Earth to outer space, linking colonial histories to interplanetary ambitions.

Asunción Molinos Gordo revives ancestral ecological knowledge through ceramic sculptures and short films. Her work on the cabañuelas—a traditional weather forecasting method based on animal behavior and landscape observation—repositions the farmer as both environmental sentinel and cultural sage, reframing peasant knowledge as key to surviving the climate crisis.

Diego Delas’s large-scale paintings, stained with tea, wine, and linseed oil, offer archaeological reflections on memory, domestic ritual, and Mediterranean craft traditions. His compositions resemble spiritual diagrams or tarot cards, inviting viewers to interpret a deeply personal yet collective lexicon of rural life and symbolic preservation.

Belén Rodríguez, known for embedding herself in remote natural environments, contributes a textile work crafted from her own recycled materials, dyed with oak and birch. Accompanied by photographs, her installation evokes care, cyclical time, and the recovery of artisanal memory in the Anthropocene.

Teresa Solar Abboud explores the boundary between the mechanical and the biological. Her vibrant sculptures—often resembling mollusks, drill heads, or mythical machines—speak to human attempts to penetrate, control, and become one with the earth. She constructs a world where clay becomes a conduit of memory, and tunnels become metaphors of inner transformation.

Claudia Pagès Rabal, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, and Álvaro Urbano bring performative, spatial, and symbolic interventions that echo through the body and architecture. From Pagès Rabal’s immersive dance-film inside ancient Spanish cisterns to Urbano’s poetic sculptural homage to García Lorca and Mexican architect Luis Barragán, these works suggest that memory is never static—it is something we must inhabit, recompose, and carry.

Irene de Andrés’s film La Isla revisits Madrid’s polluted and forgotten Manzanares River through archival imagery and ecological reflection, restoring water as a site of memory, resistance, and joy.

Collectively, these artists constitute a new wave in Spanish contemporary art—marked by a post-disciplinary approach, ecological urgency, and poetic storytelling. Their presence in Seoul is both a diplomatic gesture and a curatorial statement: art matters not because it asserts identity, but because it connects lives.necta vidas.