Exhibitions
Leonel Castañeda Galeano brings the body, desire and fragility to the Espai Isern Dalmau
The Colombian artist inaugurates one of the outstanding exhibitions of the final stretch of 2026 with a look at what lives beyond the visible body.
The Espai Isern Dalmau in Barcelona, of the Lluís Coromina Isern Foundation, is preparing to host one of the outstanding exhibitions of the last stretch of the 2026 artistic season. Next Thursday, September 3, at 7 p.m., it will inaugurate The Body of Bodies , a proposal by the Colombian artist Leonel Castañeda Galeano, curated by Fernando Cuevas Ulitzsch, which turns the body into a territory open to memory, desire, illness, care and transformation.
Castañeda Galeano constructs a universe in which the body appears fragmented, vulnerable, ambiguous and in permanent transformation. The works start from fragments of corporealities, medical devices and objects marked by their use which, arranged in display cases, acquire new readings and become presences capable of directly addressing the viewer.
The proposal thus focuses on what is usually left out of the field: bodies that do not fit into models of normality, experiences of fragility and dependence, and those forms of corporality that often provoke both attraction and rejection. In this space of ambivalence, the artist questions the way we look at and understand difference.
Between what is visible and what we prefer not to look at
Castañeda Galeano's artistic practice is built from numerous encounters between elements of diverse origins. Objects, fragments, everyday artifacts and devices associated with the medical world coincide within the same universe and, when they enter into a relationship, they abandon their original function to become symbols loaded with new meanings.
This accumulation of elements without apparent relationship generates a network of connections that moves away from a narrative, linear or unique reading. The works do not offer a closed interpretation, but rather open up multiple possibilities of linkage between the forms, materials and associations that awaken in the viewer.
The result is an artistic territory situated between the intimate and the disturbing, between science and desire, between what we consider correct and incorrect and between what we want to see and what we usually prefer to hide.
When art, science and desire meet
One of the most unique features of the Colombian artist's work is precisely his ability to blur the boundaries between disciplines and imaginaries. The accumulation of everyday objects, body remains and artefacts linked to medicine establishes unexpected connections between art, science and pornography, generating a space full of tensions.
In this game of associations, concepts such as the grotesque and the invisible, repulsion and attraction, vulnerability and desire appear. Castañeda Galeano does not intend to resolve these contradictions, but rather to make them visible and turn them into a tool for questioning the categories with which we tend to order human experience.
The body of bodies proposes looking at the body from another place. Not as a perfect structure or as a fixed identity, but as a space crossed by experiences, memories, dependencies and transformations. A body that is also other bodies and that, in its fragility, can become a place of encounter with the other.
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