Exhibitions
The Unique Animal by Abigail Lakoz
“I have a singular animal…” are the words that open the story The Crossing, written by Franz Kafka in 1917. And it is also the title that the creator Abigail Lazkoz (Bilbao, 1972) has chosen to present us with a unique retrospective of her previous production revisited and updated from her most recent works, which not only expand and modify what has already been done, but also offer new approaches and itineraries with which to reread her career.
In the artist's own words, "Cuzca is a hybrid. Half sweet, half fierce. It's a transgressed boundary, but it's domestic and familiar." Boundary transgression and hybridization are, therefore, the concepts that illuminate this exhibition, which also define her creative proposal. Lazkoz's work has been structured around the fusion and dialectic of opposites (black/white, full/empty, two-dimensionality/the constructive and object-like), as well as the breaking down and overcoming of the barriers that delimit artistic practice and, specifically, the rehabilitation and expansion of a traditional discipline, such as drawing, through a conceptual approach open to permutations and intersections.
DA2's agenda for the last quarter of 2025 is rounded out with an intelligent program that seeks to combine different proposals, generations, and areas of influence (from local and regional to national and international) through monographic exhibitions on established or mid-career artists (I Have a Singular Animal), reinterpretations of their collections (Vertical Horizon), samplings of the most recent creations (Forbidden to Forbid by Adrián Castañeda, Mateo Pardal, or Master's Theses from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Salamanca), and a focus on new audiovisual technologies (Contemporary Visions: Paloma Polo). This offering appears to consolidate a center's project that, after a complicated beginning in 2002, resulting from contradictory decisions and vacillating commitments by the authorities involved, has managed to position itself within the national contemporary art circuit, consolidating its position thanks to the definitive donation in 2023 of the significant funds of the Coca-Cola Collection to the DA2's own collection. A prime example of the alliances that must necessarily be formed between public institutions and private initiatives—a mixed model that is repeated at the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid or the CAB in Burgos, to cite just two examples from the Castilian-Leonese area—if we want to continue supporting the network of museum infrastructures dedicated to contemporary creation in our country.
