Exhibitions
Ignasi Aballí invites you to “read between the lines” at the Casa de Cervantes Museum
The exhibition "Seeing to Read ," by artist Ignasi Aballí, is on display at the Cervantes House Museum in Valladolid as a proposal specifically designed to engage with the various rooms of the historic building. The exhibition is part of the " House Taken Over " project, an initiative that invites contemporary artists to explore the intersection of visual arts and literature, reinterpreting spaces and Cervantes' legacy from a modern perspective.
Catalan artist Ignasi Aballí continues to solidify a career marked by reflection on visibility, language, and the limits of representation. In recent years, his work has been exhibited at various European institutions, articulating a coherent discourse that questions both the materiality of the image and the abundance of information in the contemporary world.
In 2024, Aballí presented the exhibition In ictu oculi at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art in Seville, a show focused on silence and painting, where the artist explored the tension between the visible and the invisible, transforming spaces based on absence and trace.
Throughout 2025, her work traveled to various European venues. At the Meessen Gallery in Brussels, the exhibition "Apparently Empty" offered a reflection on the excess of images and the loss of meaning in contemporary culture, through a collection of photographs, sculptures, and installations conceived specifically for the occasion. Meanwhile, at the Vera Cortês Gallery in Lisbon, Aballí presented "Cinzento / Grey / Gris," her first solo exhibition in Portugal, where the color grey becomes a metaphor for neutrality and indeterminacy, articulating collages of newspaper clippings, dust on wood, and paintings that oscillate between presence and disappearance.
Her most recent project, Seeing to Read , occupies the rooms of the Cervantes House Museum in Valladolid as part of the Casa Tomada program, which invites contemporary artists to engage with literature and the memory of the place. In this exhibition—conceived specifically for the museum—Aballí invites visitors to “read between the lines” of the spaces, words, and silences, extending her intervention beyond the galleries into the surrounding urban environment. The exhibition will be on view until January 18, 2026.
The works gathered in this exhibition invite reflection on the nature of the image and the artwork, as well as on our own relationship with them. These pieces explore the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, between what we perceive and what we cannot help but look at. In all of them, text occupies a central place: sometimes through its deliberate absence, other times through its absolute presence, in compositions built exclusively from words.
As a large-scale installation, Ignasi Aballí transforms the library of the Cervantes House Museum by turning over all the books whose spines do not bear the writer's surname. Thus, the volumes reveal their yellowed edges and form Pages (2025), a work that transforms absence into presence.
The exhibition extends beyond the galleries with two interventions. On the museum's façade, Casi (2025) unfolds a phrase without beginning or end, a gesture alluding to the unfinished and the impossibility of fully grasping the meaning of a work of art. Meanwhile, Índices (2025) reproduces lists from Don Quixote in poster format and scatters them throughout the city, decontextualized from the museum. With humor and subtlety, Aballí thus constructs a “library of absence,” open to infinite readings of Cervantes' classic.
