Isabel Coixet has been presenting her artistic work for more than 30 years – 26 films – in all parts of the world. From Venice to Berlin, passing through Cannes or Barcelona. But this Monday has changed the movie theaters that frequents by a museum, the Thyssen in Madrid. Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the Pinacoteca has accompanied it, to present, careful not to do any “spoiler”, The“ Secret Work of Isabel Coixet. ” collages that the author of The secret life of wordso My life without youhas created for more than a decade and that the museum now presents the public for the first time in a sample framed in Photospaña 2025. “They are all (collages) Very intriguing and knowing who they are multiplying the intrigue: we want to know what relationship they have with their films ”, summarizes Solana, the main attraction of the exhibition, entitled Learning in disobedience, Open until September 14.
It is a selection of 50 works (there are many more without being exposed) that combine from magazine cuts, “the bag of a photomaton or a semi -theotic novel of the 70s,” explains the artist, presented in a variety of supports and techniques that range from digital to the canvas, passing through the pen cardboard, paper and táblex, almost all dated between 2021 and 2024 Nothing, just because I like to accumulate things. His obsession translates into a series of “elements of many times, very disparate, living in the same space and resigning objects.” All accompanied by a literary component, a small phrase in different languages - sometimes so small that you have to strive to read – that usually gives title to the work, and that gives it meaning.
It is almost impossible to find visual or aesthetic references in collages that have paid to scenes or scripts of Coixet’s cinema. Outside “a couple of phrases” that he has used in two of his films, it is a different universe, of parallel creation and, as the title of the exhibition, liberation and disobedience. “One of the good things of collage You can make mistakes. There is something very liberating to break that 25 mm target. I carry all my life by dedicating myself to a profession where to make mistakes is very expensive and with the collage It is very easy to throw everything in the trash and start over, ”says the filmmaker. Although he acknowledges:“ The backpack that I carry behind the camera I suppose it is the same one that I carry when I do other things ”.
The star historian of Diego, curator of the exhibition, delves into the idea: “It does not mean that one thing has to do with another, because one is a very tactile thing and the other does not, but beyond the purely objective and technical, there is something of his way of seeing (that of Coixet). He is able to be taking everyday things and move them completely from their place. And I believe that there it seems to me that it seems to me. It is also, of course, an exercise of memory, and a different way of entering the life of the creator. “We are all walking anachronisms, but we do what we can to hide it. The person we were still in us and that coexistence between the six -year -old girl who hated crafts, the teenager who hated everything in general and the oldest lady who hates everything is still there living together,” says Coixet.
The Thyssen dedicates the last of the rooms of the first floor, a small cornered space where it fits – by the small format of the work – half a hundred of collages. “Something I like most about this exhibition is the room. This place (the museum) is like a three Michelin stars. The dishes we already know. I am there after coffee, right? What they give you and you don’t eat it anymore,” jokes Coixet. “I feel that I am an impostor, but I am a person who feels comfortable feeling an impostor,” he ends. Although he continues to devote himself primarily to the cinema, already immersed in the assembly of his last film, and the collages That presents, like the many more who stayed in their study, are the result of those moments of disconnection, – “if you are six hours by train and no longer want to look at the phone,” he says, they are still one more way to do what he knows best: tell stories. And, as explained by Diego in the exhibition card, in the cinema or in art “the best stories counted are those that are built in pieces.”