Exhibitions
Isabel Herguera and her cartographies of the imagination at the Filmoteca de Catalunya
The exhibition 'The desire for an imagined place' traces Isabel Herguera's creative process through drawings, notebooks and work materials, revealing the links between travel, memory and animation in her international career at the Filmoteca de Catalunya.
This spring, the Filmoteca de Catalunya presents The Desire for an Imagined Place , a new temporary exhibition dedicated to the work of filmmaker and animation artist Isabel Herguera. Curated by Nekane Aramburu, the exhibition can be visited from March 12 to June 14, 2026 and offers an in-depth look at the author's creative processes.
Following the major retrospective dedicated to Herguera in San Sebastián in 2024, this new exhibition arrives for the first time in Barcelona with a selection of some of his most relevant projects. The proposal places special emphasis on the creative processes, working methods and artisanal nature of animation, showing materials often invisible to the public: preparatory drawings, sketches, travel notebooks and working documents that reveal the origin of his visual stories.
The exhibition thus allows us to get closer to the artist's personal universe, where animated cinema is constructed as a space of experimentation between drawing, storytelling and the memory of imagined places. This journey also highlights the importance of the process —research, testing and transformation of images— as an essential part of his work.
Isabel Herguera, Los muertitos, 1993.
Herguera's career reflects international training and experience. He studied Fine Arts at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (Germany) and Animation at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), in Los Angeles. For several years he worked on different animation productions in the North American industry before returning to Spain in 2003.
From that moment on, he assumed a key role in promoting contemporary animation in the country: he directed Animac and coordinated the Moving Image Laboratory (LIM) at the Arteleku creation center, contributing to the dissemination and experimentation with new forms of animated image.
Isabel Herguera, Ámár, 2010.
With The Desire for an Imagined Place , the Filmoteca de Catalunya offers not only a tour of Isabel Herguera's work, but also an approach to her creative universe. The exhibition invites visitors to delve into the artist's working process, where each film arises from a combination of visual research, travel experience and an attentive look at the world. The exhibition also includes an unprecedented investigation into the links between Catalonia and the Basque Country in the field of video art, while also offering a tour of Isabel Herguera's different creative stages. The journey begins with the years of training and work in Germany and the United States, and extends to the projects developed later in Asia, a period in which the artist began to incorporate new forms of collaborative creation into her working process.
In this way, the exhibition is presented as an opportunity to understand how, through drawing and the language of animation, Herguera constructs poetic scenarios that move on the border between real experience and imagination.
Isabel Herguera, Amore d'inverno, 2015.
