The Museu Tàpies unveils the magical and committed work of Marta Palau
Called to be one of the exhibitions of the year, 'My paths are earthly' is the first major retrospective in Catalonia of this artist exiled in Mexico
BarcelonaAntoni Tàpies would have been delighted to welcome the Catalan-born Mexican artist Marta Palau (Albesa, 1934 - Mexico City, 2020) to his museum. She welcomed Tàpies into her studio during one of the artist's trips to Mexico, and the Tàpies Museum Palau presents her first major international posthumous retrospective from this Thursday until August 17. Both artists have in common the spiritual, magical and social character that they gave to art, as well as their interest in pre-Hispanic cultures and ancestral knowledge. In the field of art, Tàpies and Palau shared recurring interests, such as matter, the body and nature.
Palau admired Tàpies, and there are similarities between them: one of Tàpies' best-known sculptures features a foot covered in iron nails, and one of the most outstanding works in Palau's exhibition is another foot with large and small dimensions. "Marta Palau's work is articulated by the idea of the body and the idea of the earth, also understood from their opposites," says Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies and curator of the exhibition. "The earth is aware of exile, migration and borders, which can be scars. But the earth also welcomes, gives life and is fertile. The body recognises pain and has a memory. It is aware of physical and mental wounds and also generates life," says Prieto.
Marta Palau went into exile in Mexico with her parents when she was six years old and, before the Museu Tàpies, her work had only been seen in the State in smaller exhibitions at La Lonja de Zaragoza and the Museu Jaume Morera. So the Museu Tàpies exhibition, entitled My ways are earthly, represents the revival of an artist who is unjustly little known in Catalonia. And it is set to be one of the exhibitions of the year. As the artist's daughter, Marta Gasol Palau, recalls, her mother was a "tireless worker" in love with Mexican culture and folklore, and was also an "innovator in ecological art", because she very often made art with different natural fibres.
A great act of fertilization
The beginning of the tour is a celebration and a song in life and natural forces. It is, as Prieto says, "a great act of fertilization" formed by the installation Waterfall, evocative of a shower of sperm, and Ilerda, a vagina-shaped sculpture made from natural jute fiber. And the entire room is protected by two sculptures of about Naualli, figures from ancient Mexico that can be shamans and also warriors. Another outstanding piece is located at the heart of the exhibition: a spiral-shaped column made of branches and thorns that Marta Palau had on the coat rack in her studio. "It is a reflection on historical time, which is clearly not linear but spiral," explains Prieto. "This spiral goes forward and then backward and downward. With the political panorama that we have, unfortunately, we are at the moment of going backward and downward." Around this spiral are the most committed works, which are now gaining even more strength, such as the reed structures that recall the double wall that separates Tijuana from the United States and some animal figures also made with reeds titled All wars.
Marta Palau was a well-known figure in Mexico and Latin America, but rather than dedicating herself to spreading her work, she helped other colleagues. "She was very focused on reflection and little on making herself known," says the director of the Museu Tàpies. "Marta had a very well-placed ego." Among the official recognitions she received are the Mexican National Prize for Science and Arts in 2010 and the Medal of Fine Arts in 2018. In Catalonia, she was one of the fourteen Catalan exiles who in 2002 received a collective honorary doctorate from the University of Lleida.
Despite her exile, Palau never completely lost her ties with Catalonia, although she never considered returning. She married the son of the councillor Ventura Gassol and, at the end of the 1960s, she returned during a long trip through Europe, spurred by her curiosity about the political situation in the State and by reflecting on her condition as an exile. During this trip she began a new path in her work, a collaboration with Josep Grau Garriga that made her think about textiles beyond the two dimensions, as seen in IlerdaThe exhibition is a co-production with the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which will host it from November 8 to April 26, 2026.
