Ángel Marcos's "La casa del agua": An Evocative Exhibition at Museo Lázaro Galdiano

This exhibition by Ángel Marcos explores themes of water, home, and journey through three installations featuring photography and video. It reflects on inhabiting space not just physically but emotionally, reconfiguring the landscape as an extension of memory and a refuge for understanding the world.

The Museo Lázaro Galdiano presents "La casa del agua" (The House of Water), a specific project created for the institution by the renowned Spanish visual artist Ángel Marcos. Running from April 9 to June 28, 2026, the exhibition features three installations composed of series of photographs and videos, delving into themes of water, home, and journey. Marcos's work is organized around these central concepts, reflecting on the act of inhabiting space not merely as a physical state but as an emotional experience. The landscape, imbued with symbolic weight, is reconfigured as an extension of memory and a refuge for comprehending the world. Curated by Begoña Torres and sponsored by various institutions, the exhibition traverses fundamental lines of Marcos's artistic trajectory, constructing visual narratives that invite viewers to look beyond the territory as a natural setting. It leads them into a space marked by human presence and social tensions, rich with political, cultural, and economic meanings. Torres connects this to concepts like "landscape archaeology" and "material memory," highlighting photography's role in preservation, interpretation, and re-reading. Marcos himself states, "I don't do documentary photography; my intention is focused on the constant offering of thoughts through images: I want to offer emotions, corners of the soul." His rigorous and poetically rich oeuvre, developed over four decades, meditates esthetically and anthropologically on contemporary living conditions. The exhibition is structured into distinct sections. In the Salón de Baile Gallery, the installation _Partir_ (To Leave), comprising six large-format photographs and a model boat, points to the artist's constant theme of journey as a facilitator of new experiences, evoking the search for a better life, exemplified by his series on African migrants arriving on Spanish coasts. In the Arte Invitado room, the photographic series _Casas de bombas, casas de riego_ (Pump houses, irrigation houses) and a video explore the modest structures housing water machinery in the Castilian plateau. These works delve into the dignity of the everyday, the permanence of life tied to the land and water, forgotten projects, and humanity's fragile relationship with its natural environment, transforming the ordinary into an aesthetic experience. The titular installation, _La casa del agua_, located in the Museum's Portico, features a centenarian guardhouse from Olmedo, containing 14 backlit images and a video. This piece represents a fantasy and schematization of what is imagined as "home," reflecting a duality between an attractive inner transcendence and a longing for the itinerant life, a space of immense solitude that suggests a new way of seeing both the landscape and the world.

Admission to the exhibition is included with the general museum ticket. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, from 9:30 to 15:00, with extended hours on weekdays from 16:30 to 19:30.