"Pablo Palazuelo. The line as a dream of architecture", at the ICO Museum

The exhibition takes a tour of the work of Pablo Palazuelo structured into nine areas, ranging from the artist's formative stage and early influences to his furniture designs for the domestic environment or the great works conceived for the urban scale, going through others in which the emphasis falls on references to labyrinths, transits, enclosures, limits and stained glass windows.

In total, 12 works and 12 projects are exhibited covered by numerous drawings, sketches, watercolours, models and sculptures, preserved in the Pablo Palazuelo Foundation. The sample presents for the first time some of them unpublished until their cataloguing by the curators.

The exhibition is curated by Teresa Raventós-Viñas and Gonzalo Sotelo-Calvillo, the latter author of a doctoral thesis, "Analysis of Pablo Palazuelo's geometry from the architect's vision" (2015), which serves as the basis for the exhibition tour.

In Sotelo's words, Palazuelo's creative method "bears an astonishing similarity with the methodology of the architectural project, going through a series of graphic stages that led him progressively from the initial sketches to the most defined plans of materialization." This particular method led him, for example, to use sketch paper, the transparency of which allowed him to superimpose different sketches while developing his works, a system he learned in his initial training as an architect at the City of Oxford School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied between 1933 and 1936.


Pablo Palazuelo. No title. 1988 Pencil on paper 37.4 x 53 cm. Courtesy of the Pablo Palazuelo Foundation.


Pablo Palazuelo. Wall. 1998 Scrubbed aluminum 40.5 x 83 x 24.5 cm. Courtesy of the Pablo Palazuelo Foundation.


Pablo Palazuelo together with the oils Accord Noir (1958) and Imagination du Temps I (1958). Galapagar, c. 1958. Photography: Enrique Palazuelo. Courtesy of the Pablo Palazuelo Foundation.