Image: Lázaro Galdiano Museum, Madrid
The Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid is preparing to bring Isabel Matoses back into view this summer with 'Isabel Matoses: La Imagen Recuperada', an exhibition and accompanying publication dedicated to the Madrid-born artist, identified by the museum as a pioneer of experimental photography in Spain during the Transition. The show opens on 8 July and runs until 6 September 2026 in the museum’s Sala Pórtico, Galería and Arte Invitado spaces.
According to the museum’s announcement, Matoses (1930-1985) had critical and institutional recognition in the 1970s and taught a generation of photographers who went on to open new creative paths, yet her work has remained largely invisible. The museum says the project aims to recover her figure and practice through a book-catalogue, 'Elaboraciones fotográficas (1969-1985)', and a presentation of nearly her entire dispersed oeuvre, much of it unpublished or outside public circulation for four decades.
The exhibition will present more than 70 images. The museum describes Matoses’s visual language as one that moves across photography, drawing, printmaking and painting, with affinities to Pop Art, Op Art and certain psychedelic aesthetics. Rather than treating photography as a fixed medium, the announcement emphasizes her intervention of the image through technical manipulation, subjective vision and formal experimentation, features that shaped a practice concerned with memory, time, identity and perception.
The museum positions the project as an art-historical recovery as well as an exhibition. In its own description, the double project of exhibition and book seeks to reframe questions through which photography in Spain has traditionally been interpreted and to help clarify the visual culture of the period. The emphasis on Matoses’s artisanal handling of photographic processes and her mixed-media approach suggests a practice that sits at the intersection of experimental image-making and broader debates about the status of photography as art.
The exhibition is curated by Begoña Torres. The museum’s notice states that entry is included in the museum ticket price. It also identifies the display areas as the Sala Pórtico, Galería and Arte Invitado, underscoring that the presentation will be spread across several museum spaces rather than confined to a single room.
'Isabel Matoses: La Imagen Recuperada' is one part of the museum’s summer programme for 2026, which also includes other temporary exhibitions and activities listed in the same announcement. Those additional items range from outdoor sculpture and a PHotoESPAÑA-linked photography show to family visits and a children’s camp, but the Matoses project stands out in the museum’s lineup for the scale of the recovery it promises: a public viewing of a body of work that the museum says has long remained dispersed, unseen and outside circulation until now.
