Exhibitions
Ana Prada and the metamorphosis of things
What happens when an object ceases to be what it once was? Much of Ana Prada's practice is situated in this space of transformation, between a thing's recognizable identity and its potential new existence. Her work often begins with everyday objects, household utensils, and humble materials that, subjected to processes of repetition, alteration, assembly, or displacement, gradually abandon their original function to acquire a new nature. The familiar becomes strange; the useful ceases to be so, and what seemed banal reveals an unexpected capacity to generate image, rhythm, form, and thought.
This transformation also constitutes the starting point of The Dream of the Image , Prada's first solo exhibition at the Luis Adelantado Gallery, which can be visited from September 18 to November 9, 2026. The project occupies all four rooms of the space and proposes a journey through an artistic trajectory in which objects are never closed elements or simple materials available to construct a sculpture. They are, above all, bodies in process, susceptible to modifying their appearance and, with it, the meanings they embody.
The exhibition's title itself alludes to this idea of change. The Dream of the Image speaks of a moment when things have not yet acquired a definitive identity. Like the myth of Daphne, whose pursued body transforms into a laurel tree and remains suspended between two natures, Prada's work is situated in that transitional instant where something ceases to be what it was without ever fully settling into a new definition. It is precisely in this interval that the image appears: fragile, unstable, and sometimes fleeting, yet capable of concentrating its own unique intensity.
The objects that arrive at her works carry a prior history. They have been touched by use, by domestic memory, by industrial production, or by visual culture. Prada leads them to another condition, somewhere between the sculptural and the graphic, altering their scale, their arrangement, their repetition, or their relationships with other elements. The result does not aim to offer a single interpretation, but rather to generate a perceptual situation in which what we thought we knew is presented to us again in a different way.
In this operation, the artist works in an intermediate zone where looking also involves reconstructing. Perception ceases to be a passive act because the work introduces a slight deviation from the recognizable. Simply modifying a form, repeating it, accumulating it, or displacing it is enough for an everyday object to lose some of its familiarity and begin to function as something else. The object then ceases to be merely an object and becomes an image, a structure, a rhythm, or sculptural matter.
The exhibition unfolds this idea across Luis Adelantado's four rooms, constructing a journey in which the image appears not so much as a representation as the result of a metamorphosis. The pieces disrupt the usual order of things and propose formal systems that grow, expand, repeat, or fold back. In them, the organic and the artificial coexist, as do playfulness and precision, lightness and material insistence.
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