Image: Museum of Contemporary Art, Vigo, Baltimore
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Vigo (MARCO) has opened 'Circus', a solo exhibition by the Bilbao-born artist Alejandra Icaza that gathers a broad selection of works spanning several decades. According to the museum and reporting in La Voz de Galicia, the show presents Icaza’s world of color, memory, play and emotion through paintings and collages made with materials including oil and wax. The exhibition is on view in the museum’s first-floor rooms through October 11.
The presentation marks Icaza’s first solo exhibition at the Vigo museum. It is curated by Miguel Fernández-Cid, who is also the museum’s director. The source material describes the exhibition as an intimate and playful universe, one that brings together small-format works and large canvases in a display designed to show the range of her practice rather than a single period or style.
Icaza’s work is characterized in the source material as being driven by freedom of creation and by a close relationship between painting and lived experience. Her canvases and collages combine symbols, memories and everyday references, inviting viewers to move through the works without searching for one fixed reading. During the opening, the artist said her paintings “destilan mucho color y alegría” because they are born “desde la emoción, no desde la cabeza,” a remark quoted in the report.
The exhibition also reflects Icaza’s refusal of rigid boundaries between abstraction and figuration. In the report, she questions what an abstract painting is “sino un paisaje exterior o interior a través de una mirada,” underscoring the idea that her pictures emerge from perception and feeling rather than from a predetermined scheme. The article cites a recollection from her student years, when a professor asked what she had intended with one of her works and she answered simply: “Pintar un cuadro.”
Born in Bilbao in 1966, Icaza trained in London, Madrid, Barcelona, Baltimore and New York, where she lived for two decades before settling in Madrid. The source says her work has been shown in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands, and that it belongs to public and private collections including the CGAC, the Fundación Cultural Banesto and the Fundación Barceló in Palma de Mallorca.
Fernández-Cid described 'Circus' as a particularly singular proposal within the museum’s current programme, noting that its mix of meticulous drawing, color and small collages forms an “jeroglífico emocional” that evokes childhood memory while also pointing to Flemish painters and Oriental miniature traditions. After its run in Vigo, the exhibition is scheduled to travel to Sala Rekalde in Bilbao.
