Exhibitions

The exhibition brings together for the first time the work of Laura Larraz (Zaragoza, 1989; lives and works in Berlin) and Mercedes Mangrané (Barcelona, 1988; lives and works in Barcelona), two artists who approach painting from very different yet impactful perspectives: Larraz’s gestural and narrative intensity contrasted with Mangrané’s intimate focus on the quotidian. The project presents an encounter between two ways of understanding the image as an unstable territory, where painting does not describe the world but rather displaces it and calls it into question. In Laura Larraz’s case, painting functions as a space charged with emotion and narrative in which the figure of the animal—with cats as a recurring presence—acts as a catalyst. Her works are structured as open scenes permeated by tensions of humor, violence, desire, and vulnerability. The image is constructed in layers of moving matter, in a continuous state of appearing and disappearing, generating an imaginary realm that oscillates between the theatrical, the tragic, and the comic. Mercedes Mangrané’s practice operates within a register that addresses containment as a catalyst, based on the somatic observation of surfaces and their forms of rupture. Her oil paintings draw on fragments of reality—walls, reflections, traces, and erosions—which are transformed into visual structures where matter and corporeality intersect. Rather than describing, her works suggest: images in transit that oscillate between presence and absence, recognition and dissolution, and that invite the viewer to perceive slowly. Both pictorial practices share a conception of painting as a space of friction. In Larraz’s work, this friction manifests in the energy of her gestures and the narrative density; in Mangrané’s, in the subtlety of the surface and the accumulation of time. The exhibition does not seek to establish a single interpretation, but rather to create an interval: a space where the image remains open, unstable, and in tension. The dialogue between the two artists proposes a reflection on contemporary ways of constructing images through painting—understood not as representation, nor even as an evolution of form, but as a field where the visible is constantly negotiated.