For the first time, the Museu Tàpies is hosting a major retrospective of Marta Palau, featuring drawings, paintings, and some of her large textile installations, presented alongside objects and materials from her personal archive that have never been exhibited before. The exhibition, co-produced with the MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo of the National Autonomous University of Mexico), will travel in the autumn to the Mexican institution with the support of the Institut Ramon Llull. This project represents the first major international exhibition following the death of the artist from Lleida, who went into exile in Tijuana in 1941 because of Franco’s dictatorship.

Marta Palau. My Paths are Earthly is presented as a network of bodies/works structured around two main axes that coexist through their opposites: the concept of land, linked to exile and refuge, understood both as a wound and a scar; and the concept of the body, representing the pain of migration and loss, but also healing and the potential for regeneration. In Palau’s work, everything is filtered through her own biography—an experience that extends and remains relevant today in the face of the conflicts that define the contemporary world, as well as its possibilities for transformation.

The exhibition’s curator and director of the Tàpies Museum, Imma Prieto, notes that “Marta Palau’s work restores our memory, our history. It falls within one of the institution’s key research lines related to historical recovery while also engaging in dialogue with Tàpies. We continue working in the present, opening spaces for reflection and resistance, thinking of art as an act of defence and transformation.”

The exhibition’s opening at the Tàpies Museum will take place on Thursday, 27 February, at 19:00, featuring a performance by the Catalan composer and singer Adelaida.