Marta Palau

The exhibition Mis caminos son terrestres of Marta Palau is the first major international retrospective of the artist since her passing in 2022.

Palau’s multidisciplinary creations fuse contemporary languages with ancestral artistic techniques to explore concepts such as territory, exile, and migration—works that are deeply autobiographical while also reflecting conflicts that remain relevant today.

Her work addresses contemporary social and political wounds, rooted in her own experience of exile to Mexico during the Franco regime, and shaped by the border context of her years living in Tijuana.

The MUAC’s Arkheia Documentation Center houses the Marta Palau Archive, from which several documentary materials are included in this exhibition, some of them being shown for the first time.

As an echo of this exhibition, the Museo Universitario del Chopo is restoring Quetzalcoatlus, a monumental work created by Marta Palau in 2003 and kept in storage for the past twenty years.

The exhibition is organized in collaboration between the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) and the Museu Tàpies.

Starting on November 15, the MUAC presents a retrospective of Marta Palau (Albesa, Lleida, 1934 – Mexico City, 2022) under the title Mis caminos son terrestres, featuring drawings, paintings, and several of her large-scale textile installations. These works are accompanied by objects and materials from her personal archive and the Marta Palau Collection at Arkheia, many of which have never been exhibited before.

Following its presentation at the Museu Tàpies, this exhibition unfolds along two main axes that coexist in contrast: the idea of the earth—linked to exile and shelter, understood as both wound and scar—and the idea of the body, representing the pain of migration and loss, but also healing and the possibility of generating life.

In Palau’s work, everything filters through her own biography—an experience that expands and remains resonant through the conflicts that define our contemporary moment, as well as through the possibilities of transformation.

Curated by Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies, Marta Palau. Mis caminos son terrestres brings together three central themes in the artist’s work: migration, memory, and the earth. The symbolism in her pieces—through the representation of the eye, the hand, and the foot—invites us to reflect on the cosmologies of sky, earth, and roots. The finitude of the physical body leaves a trace that appeals to a memory transcending the individual, inscribed in collective imagination.

“Marta Palau’s work stands as a hybrid between her own lived experience and her interests or needs in relation to the world. A world inherited through ancestral knowledge, on the one hand, and another shaped by lived, shared, and collective experiences. For her, everything is a sum of knowledge and gestures of resistance in the face of the paths humanity and its societies are taking,” — Imma Prieto

Organized in collaboration between the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC, UNAM) and the Museu Tàpies (MTà), Barcelona, with the support of the Centro Cultural de España en México, the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), and the Institut Ramon Llull in Barcelona, this exhibition explores the artist’s work through a different lens from the chronological-biographical narratives that have defined her previous shows and publications, establishing themes and fields of interest such as textile work, the body, and magic.

Mis caminos son terrestres takes its title from one of the central pieces of the exhibition, as well as from Palau’s solo show at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1985. The exhibition marks the first major international presentation of her work since the Catalan artist’s passing in 2022, who went into exile in Tijuana with her parents in 1941 following the Franco dictatorship.

— MUAC