Exhibitions
From film to paper: Isabel Coixet and the art of storytelling with collages
Isabel Coixet's Learning in Disobedience is the Spanish filmmaker's first solo exhibition, creating a unique journey through the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. The temporary exhibition will be on view until September 14 as part of the PHotoEspaña 2025 festival, curated by Estrella de Diego.
Guerrilla on a Sofa, Isabel Coixet, courtesy of the artist, 2014.
This exhibition presents a curated selection of 50 previously unpublished collages created by Isabel Coixet between 2015 and 2024. Constructed using mixed media, these works combine magazine clippings, photographic images, and elements from everyday life, often accompanied by phrases in different languages that amplify their symbolic meaning. The exhibition is an intimate and profoundly literary exploration, in which each collage acts as a narrative fragment imbued with sensitivity and lyricism.
Far from responding to aesthetic norms or external expectations, Coixet understands this practice as an act of free and honest expression, a creative territory that allows her to distance herself from social conventions and the impulse to please. Her compositions, halfway between visual diary and visual poetry, offer a complex and multifaceted portrait of her inner world, revealing obsessions, ironies, memories, and desires in a visual form that invites calm contemplation and personal interpretation.
My homework is to practice civil disobedience, Isabel Coixet, courtesy of the artist, 2024.
As Estrella de Diego points out, Isabel Coixet's works radiate the same attitude of creative disobedience that permeates her films. In her collages, as in her films, she addresses the everyday—those small things that often go unnoticed—with a sensitivity that challenges the seemingly trivial. The domestic, the intimate, and the anecdotal are transformed into profound questions, treated from unusual and suggestive perspectives. In this visual universe, phrases in different languages function as poetic interruptions or narrative triggers: small signs that guide or divert the gaze, opening multiple layers of interpretation. This practice reflects her desire to multiply meanings and construct fragmented narratives, in which interpretation always remains in the hands of the viewer.
Among the collages on display are My Homework Is to Practice Civil Disobedience (2024), a digital work that reflects the spirit of political resistance, and Guerrillero de Canapé (2014), a piece that brings together and combines elements of everyday life with a guerrilla aesthetic. Isabel Coixet has expressed that collage offers her a way to capture that which escapes other languages, a way to capture the ephemeral from the absolute freedom of the artistic gesture. This practice, which moves away from the technical and narrative restrictions of cinema, allows her to explore more intuitive and personal territories. Although her collages form a parallel universe independent of her filmography, both worlds share the same fragmentary sensibility and a deeply narrative perspective: the ability to construct stories from scraps, minimal gestures, and unexpected associations.
