Exhibitions
Cinta Vidal challenges the gravity of architecture
UPEND explores the limits of space built from modern and brutalist architecture, while the Catalan artist also signs the poster for La Mercè 2026.
Cinta Vidal returns to architecture to question it. Not so much to represent it as to dismantle its certainties, alter its coordinates and imagine other ways of inhabiting space. In UPEND , her second solo exhibition at Zink, in Seubersdorf, the Catalan artist presents a new set of paintings in which the references of post-war modern architecture and Brutalism become the raw material of a pictorial universe where gravity ceases to be an unquestionable law.
The exhibition, which opens on September 19 and can be visited until November 1, 2026, places special attention on French architecture and, particularly, on the work of Le Corbusier. It also includes references to Mies van der Rohe, Atelier de Montrouge and Frank Lloyd Wright, architects who have contributed, each from different perspectives, to defining a certain idea of modernity based on order, structure, functionality and the relationship between space and form.
But Vidal does not approach this legacy as a painter interested simply in reproducing it. She takes it, fragments it and displaces it. Volumes, facades, structural grids and concrete surfaces abandon their original architectural function to integrate into a new visual grammar. Buildings cease to be containers to become open forms, susceptible to being reorganized into compositions that seem to defy physical laws.
This operation is especially significant in an artist who has made impossible structures, shared spaces and suspended architectures one of the centers of her research. In the new paintings, perspective multiplies and gravity shifts. What in modern architecture could represent stability, order and rationality is transformed into a more ambiguous, almost choreographic construction, in which each element seems to seek a new position.
Brutalism, with its material forcefulness and its commitment to leaving structures visible, offers Vidal a particularly rich formal repertoire. Concrete, modules, geometries and heavy volumes lose their apparent immobility here. The painter subjects them to a process of de-hierarchization that allows buildings to be seen from multiple angles and, above all, to coexist in the same space without being subject to a single perspective.
It is at this point that UPEND transcends strictly architectural interest. The works raise a reflection on the way we construct the spaces we inhabit and on the structures —physical but also mental— that determine our relationship with others. Architecture no longer appears as a fixed form, but as a system susceptible to being altered, shared and reinterpreted. Vidal thus introduces an almost political dimension into images that, at first glance, may seem purely geometric.
The temporal coincidence with another particularly visible project of the artist reinforces this moment of projection of her work. Cinta Vidal is also the author of the poster for the Mercè 2026, an intervention that places her imagination in a citizen and popular context very different from that of the gallery space. If UPEND starts from architecture to imagine other forms of spatial coexistence, the poster for the Barcelona festival extends this capacity to construct visual worlds towards the public and collective space.
Between brutalist architecture and the festa major, between concrete and celebration, a common desire emerges: to question established ways of looking. Vidal works with structures that we recognize to alter them until they stop behaving as we expected. His buildings can be upside down, suspended, share impossible walls or coexist on the same surface without obeying a specific architecture. And it is precisely this impossibility that opens the door to another way of understanding space.
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