Madrid,
Monumental in its dimensions, raw in its translation of the vulnerable human experience. These are the basic features of the production of the British sculptor, resident in Los Angeles, Thomas Houseago, trained at Central Saint Martins in London and at De Ateliers (Amsterdam) and author, for three decades, of pieces with anthropomorphic shapes in which he combines traditional materials and a contemporary look.
Its first exhibition in our country can be visited today in the Banca March gardens, adjacent to the Juan March Foundation on Castelló Street, and has been curated by Anne Pontégnie. It consists of seven works representative of his career, dated between 2008 and 2025, dedicated once again to the human figure and made with plaster, wood or bronze, common components in his discipline with which he tries to manifest the inevitable inclination of the human being towards the search for the essential and the union, in its own nature, of fragility and strength.
Among the most representative are the recent Janus – Mirror – Figure (2025), which testifies to the combination between primitive influences and contemporary language that is constant in his career; and Large Walking Figure I (Leeds)dated 2013, a figure almost five meters high that we can interpret as his particular walking mana recurring sculptural motif since clay was molded. It is not missing either Aluminum Construction No. 1 (Giant)which leads us to the origins of our species.
His concern for the human figure draws from his study of Greek sculpture, but the desire to approach the formal perfection of the ancients or to generate compositions of accessible beauty has never crossed Houseago’s mind; His terrain is that of investigation, raw and lacking in anecdotes, of the body and his creations transmit a raw physicality with which he seeks to suggest the complexity of man’s experience from his very presence on earth.
Sometimes, for this reason, other materials of industrial origin coexist with their usual simple materials, such as iron rods and hemp, which add expressive power while underlining the entanglement of human life between past inheritance and the impositions of the present. This intricacy is also emphasized by his desire not to hide his work processes: the traces of modeling achieved with his hands or with simple instruments, the unions of fragments of matter, the tensions between heavy and light areas.
The artist thus becomes present in his compositions, which acquire an almost performative dimension: the finished pieces are inseparable from the layers of work from which they derive.
We were referring earlier to Large Walking Figure I (Leeds) as your particular walking man; Indeed, Giacometti and Rodin are among his references, in addition to the aforementioned ancient sculptors, other avant-garde figures such as Picasso or Brancusi and icons of today’s music and fiction, such as Ziggy Stardustby David Bowie, or Darth Vaderby George Lucas.
The fruits of this crossing of influences with her own perspective can only be hybrids, a trait that, for Houseago as for Donna Haraway, is inherent to our times. as he prays The Cyborg Manifesto from the philosopher: At the end of the 20th century, our era, a mythical era, we are all chimeras, theoretical and manufactured hybrids of machine and organism; In short, we are cyborgs.
“Thomas Houseago. Sculptures”
BANCA MARCH
C/ Castelló, 75
Madrid
From May 1 to October 31, 2026
