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Diego Delas

La madrépora, 2025

Photo: Roberto Ruíz
Diego Delas
Collection
Artworks On view

Diego Delas

La madrépora, 2025

Oil on canvas, artist's frame ebonized with black tea, wine, and linseed oil

252 × 197 × 4 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

 

Diego Delas’s works explore the house as both a physical structure and a vessel of personal, familial, and collective memory. Drawing on his upbringing in Spain’s rural Castile region, Delas constructs images that recall vernacular architecture, domestic rituals, and the subtle stratification of time.

His paintings often incorporate reclaimed textiles, structural materials, and handmade elements, evoking spaces where memory and matter intertwine. These works function like fragments of a larger dwelling, including murals, maps, and talismanic objects that resemble the structure of tarot cards and act as amulets. Their composition suggests a reading, both of the whole and of each element in particular, arranged in an order that invites deciphering and interpretation of their cryptic nature. Patterns and textures reference household practices from pre-modern Mediterranean culture— such as mending, making, and remembering— echoing the seasonal rhythms of rural life. Names and titles are drawn from the Catalogue of Amulets by Carmen Baroja, Museo del Pueblo Español.

 

Through this visual language, Delas activates the tension between preservation and erasure, between what is remembered and what is lost. As in much of his practice, these paintings inhabit a space between archaeology and storytelling, where the act of looking becomes a form of listening: to places, people, and traditions on the verge of disappearance.

 

CURRENTLY ON VIEW:

 

Group show: Clear, Lucid, and Awake - Spanish Artists from the TBA21 Collection

Curator:  Chus Martínez

Venue: Exhibition at Art Sonje Center, Seoul

Date: May 9 – July 20, 2025

Related works in the collection
Diego Delas Burmese Amulets (Castillo bajo el polvo), 2024
Diego Delas La lámpara del cuerpo, 2025
Diego Delas La madrépora, 2025
Artists
Diego Delas