The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza presents until 14 September in room 30 a selection of fifty collages by film director and screenwriter Isabel Coixet (1960). Curated by Estrella de Diego, this show is part of the PhotoEspaña 2025 program.
Coixet has been working for years on collages of papers and photos where he puts the viewer in a narrative place similar to that of cinema from his editing games. As the commissioner explains, “the best told stories are those that are built in fragments,” which require an effort to recompose the pieces and give them a meaning, something common in cinema and, specifically, in Coixet.
The collage emerged in the early 20th century from artists such as Braque and Picasso, followed by other avant-gardists like the Germans Kurt Schwitters or Hanna Höch, who began to collect and paste pieces and images to build new realities. This experimentation has its origin, in turn, in the way that cinema, from its birth in 1895, creates stories through fragments, frames, changing the way of observing the world of an entire generation. As with collage, whose essence lies in the load of meaning of the pieces that compose it, cinema, according to the commissioner, must have a “margin for divination”.
The exhibition, Isabel Coixet. Collages. Learnings of disobedience, is composed by half a hundred collages presented in a variety of media and techniques ranging from digital to canvas, through the cardboard pen, paper and board. In this selection, of small and medium format, a kind of series game is proposed where the contrast and visual strength of each piece is emphasized. The majority of these compositions date from recent years, between 2021 and 2024, although some earlier ones are also included, offering a broad vision of the work of the filmmaker.
