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

Exhibition at Art Sonje Center, Seoul

May 9 – July 20, 2025

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Teresa Solar. Tuneladora, 2021. Installation view: When Forms Come Alive, Hayward Gallery / Southbank Centre, London, United Kingdom, 2024. Photo: Jo Underhill

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To mark the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Spain and South Korea, a major exhibition of Spanish contemporary art opens at Art Sonje Center in Seoul this spring. Clear, Lucid, and Awake, curated by Chus Martínez and co-produced by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and Art Sonje Center, in collaboration with the Spanish Ministry of Culture, Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), AECID, and the Embassy of Spain in the Republic of Korea, brings together ten acclaimed Spanish artists whose works resonate across borders, cultures, and ecological urgencies. This exhibition constructs a dialogue between two nations that are geographically distant yet culturally resonant—both peninsulas with deep maritime histories, industrialized transitions, and complex relationships with their rural landscapes. Clear, Lucid, and Awake emphasizes common trajectories of modernization, ecological transformation, and cultural reinvention.

 

Spanning sculpture, video, installation, and performance, the exhibition presents a powerful portrait of Spain’s contemporary artistic landscape—while offering space for connection with Korean cultural experience.

 

Reimagining Coexistence Through Art

The exhibition draws from the renowned TBA21 Collection and explores themes such as folklore, oral history, ecological trauma, and collective memory. The artists featured—many of whom are part of a generation invested in ecological, gender, and social justice—see art as a catalyst for regeneration, reconnection, and reparation. Their works propose alternative temporalities, where the geological and historical coexist with the mythic and imagined.

 

At the heart of Clear, Lucid, and Awake is a dialogue between Spain’s contemporary artistic community and the Korean cultural context—a resonance deepened through the show’s shared themes: coastal geographies, urban transformation, ecological precarity, and the overlooked wisdom of rural traditions.

 

Cristina Lucas, one of Spain’s most internationally recognized artists, contributes embroidered maps from her Tufting series. These works are visual counter-narratives that chart the scars of aerial warfare and ideological division—drawing a potent parallel between the legacies of the Spanish Civil War and the Korean War.

 

Regina de Miguel’s Nekya: A River Film, a 74-minute video commission by TBA21, immerses viewers in the mythologies and traumas of Spain’s Riotinto mining region—an otherworldly landscape that evokes both environmental degradation and resistance. Her installations explore speculative futures where extractivism shifts from Earth to outer space, linking colonial histories to interplanetary ambitions.

 

Asunción Molinos Gordo revives ancestral ecological knowledge through ceramic sculptures and short films. Her work on the cabañuelas—a traditional weather forecasting method based on animal behavior and landscape observation—repositions the farmer as both environmental sentinel and cultural sage, reframing peasant knowledge as key to surviving the climate crisis.

 

Diego Delas’s large-scale paintings, stained with tea, wine, and linseed oil, offer archaeological reflections on memory, domestic ritual, and Mediterranean craft traditions. His compositions resemble spiritual diagrams or tarot cards, inviting viewers to interpret a deeply personal yet collective lexicon of rural life and symbolic preservation.

 

Belén Rodríguez, known for embedding herself in remote natural environments, contributes a textile work crafted from her own recycled materials, dyed with oak and birch. Accompanied by photographs, her installation evokes care, cyclical time, and the recovery of artisanal memory in the Anthropocene.

 

Teresa Solar Abboud explores the boundary between the mechanical and the biological. Her vibrant sculptures—often resembling mollusks, drill heads, or mythical machines—speak to human attempts to penetrate, control, and become one with the earth. She constructs a world where clay becomes a conduit of memory, and tunnels become metaphors of inner transformation.

 

Claudia Pagès, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, and Álvaro Urbano bring performative, spatial, and symbolic interventions that echo through the body and architecture. From Pagès’s immersive dance-film inside ancient Spanish cisterns to Urbano’s poetic sculptural homage to García Lorca and Mexican architect Luis Barragán, these works suggest that memory is never static—it is something we must inhabit, recompose, and carry.

 

Irene de Andrés’s film La Isla revisits Madrid’s polluted and forgotten Manzanares River through archival imagery and ecological reflection, restoring water as a site of memory, resistance, and joy.

 

Collectively, these artists constitute a new wave in Spanish contemporary art—marked by a post-disciplinary approach, ecological urgency, and poetic storytelling. Their presence in Seoul is both a diplomatic gesture and a curatorial statement: art matters not because it asserts identity, but because it connects lives.

 

Public activities and visiting program

In addition to being an exhibition, Clear, Lucid, and Awake is conceived as an exercise in mutual learning between the artistic communities of Spain and South Korea, aiming to foster lasting relationships between artists, curators, and institutions from both contexts.

 

On one hand, the exhibition is accompanied by a multidisciplinary public program during the opening weekend (May 10 and 11). Among the scheduled activities are a roundtable discussion with Belén Rodríguez, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Diego Delas, and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, focused on artistic practices that intertwine nature and creation from a poetic and active perspective; the screening of Nekya. A River-Film, followed by a conversation with the filmmaker, Regina de Miguel; and a performance by Claudia Pagès.

 

On the other hand, TBA21’s interest in promoting art as a tool for transnational connection and shared critical thinking is extended through an intensive visiting program, including professional meetings, institutional visits, and spaces for dialogue designed to encourage meaningful connections between actors from the Korean art ecosystem and the participating Spanish artists. Through this initiative, the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation reinforces its commitment as an international institution based in Spain, dedicated to supporting and amplifying the work of Spanish artists abroad by generating sustainable platforms for visibility, exchange, and collaboration.

 

Discover the public program HERE

 

Exchange

TBA21’s curatorial vision and long-term relationships with Spanish artists reflect a commitment to art as a catalyst for change across continents, media, and audiences. Chus Martínez, curator of the exhibition, delves into the relevance of the exhibition: “In a moment when geopolitics has become a game of antagonisms, it is important to learn how to relate contexts that are rarely considered ‘comparable.’ Why? To be able to see the world as a whole. We never imagined we would face an anti-globalization backlash for the reasons that now dominate the headlines. That is why the best way to ‘celebrate’ bilateral relations is through an exhibition—a space where the experiences of very different places and cultures are presented as similar, possible, future-oriented, and close. An exhibition is, in other words, a negotiating front.”

 

The anniversary is celebrated in both directions, and the presence of Korean artists in Spain in different projects over the next few months is an opportunity to continue building a shared future, one that requires a great deal of generosity and imagination.

 

CURATOR

Chus Martínez

 

LOCATION

Art Sonje Center
87 Yulgok-ro 3-gil

Jongno-gu Seoul

03062 Korea

 

Organized by Art Sonje Center and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in collaboration with the Spanish Ministry of Culture, Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), and the Embassy of Spain in the Republic of Korea.

RELATED PROGRAM

Clear, Lucid, and Awake | Public Program Art Sonje Centre, Seoul