Image: Collezione Maramotti, Boston
Alain Urrutia will present more than 20 new paintings and two videos in ‘ABIAPUNTUA’, opening at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy, on 8 November 2026. The exhibition, which runs through 14 February 2027, will be the Basque painter’s first solo presentation in Italy at an institutional venue.
Based in Berlin, Urrutia was born in Bilbao in 1981 and lives and works in the German capital. He studied at the University of the Basque Country and at Milan’s Brera Academy, graduating in 2004. His exhibition history includes presentations at CAB Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos in 2025, Casa Siza in Mexico City in 2024, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2023, and the Boston Center for the Arts in 2015.
The exhibition takes its title from the Basque word ‘abiapuntua’, which Urrutia has chosen as the conceptual starting point for the new body of work. The term refers to the language of the Basque Country, where the artist was born and raised, and establishes a point of departure for a project built around questions of images, memory and representation.
Urrutia is described by the institution as a collector of images with a sustained interest in the ways representation is constructed visually and mentally. His paintings draw on subjects and objects taken from art history, everyday life and cinema, as well as from a personal image archive. That archive is presented as a living digital atlas, arranged as a constellation, and will be shared with the public for the first time through nine interwoven themes.
The exhibition’s route will follow a circular structure through the artist’s mind, according to the institutional description. The paintings will be made strictly in shades of grey, while the two videos will extend the project beyond the painted image. The source material does not specify the videos’ titles, subjects or production details.
Collezione Maramotti is a contemporary art collection open to the public in Reggio Emilia since 2007. Its holdings comprise several hundred works made from 1945 to the present, with more than 200 works on permanent display, representing major tendencies in Italian and international art from the second half of the 20th century through today. Its temporary exhibition programme focuses on invitations to emerging and mid-career artists to develop projects specifically conceived for the collection, alongside group exhibitions drawn from its archive and presentations by winners of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women.
‘ABIAPUNTUA’ will be open free of charge on Thursdays and Fridays from 2:30 to 6:30 p.m., and on Saturdays and Sundays from 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. The exhibition will be closed on 25 and 26 December, and on 1 and 6 January. Collezione Maramotti is located at Via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia.
