Exhibition

Pablo Palazuelo at Museo ICO

15/02/2023

Pablo Palazuelo, Circa Proyecto, 1990. © Fundación Pablo Palazuelo, 2023

In tune with the sixth Madrid Design Festival, the exhibition 'Pablo Palazuelo: The Line as a Dream of Architecture' is on view through 7 May at Museo ICO.

Curated by Teresa Raventós-Viñas and Gonzalo Sotelo-Calvillo, it offers a walk through twelve works and twelve projects of the Madrid artist Pablo Palazuelo (1915-2007), who studied architecture at the City of Oxford School of Arts and Crafts from 1933 to 1936. Through 130 works (watercolors, models, sculptures, drawings, sketches...), among them some being catalogued seen in public for the first time, the show establishes a clear link between architecture and the artistic output of this representative of 20th-century geometric abstraction.

In Sotelo's words, Palazuelo's creative method was "astonishingly similar to the methodology of architectural design, involving a series of graphic stages progressively leading from initial sketches to the most defined materialization schemes." This particular procedure, learned during his initial studies in architecture school, led him, for example, to the use of sketching paper for painting, as its transparency allowed him to superimpose different sketches while developing his works. The line is the protagonist in his compositions. A paraphrasing of Paul Klee's "the line dreams," which Palazuelo often quoted and on which the exhibition's title is based.