The exhibition brings together, for the first time, the work of Laura Larraz (Zaragoza, 1989; lives and works in Berlin) and Mercedes Mangrané (Barcelona, 1988; lives and works in Barcelona) two artists whose approaches to painting are as distinct as they are complementary: Larraz's gestural, narrative intensity against Mangrané's intimate attention to the quotidian. Together, their work stages an encounter between two ways of understanding the image as unstable territory, where painting does not describe the world but displaces it, calling it into question.

​

In Larraz's paintings, the animal, most often the cat,  acts as a catalyst within scenes charged with emotion and narrative. Structured as open tableaux, her works are threaded with tensions of humor, violence, desire, and vulnerability. The image builds in layers of restless matter, caught in a continuous state of appearing and disappearing, conjuring an imaginary realm that shifts between the theatrical, the tragic, and the comic.

​

Mangrané's practice, by contrast, treats containment itself as a catalyst, working from a somatic reading of surfaces and their ruptures. Her oil paintings draw on fragments of reality — walls, reflections, traces, erosions transformed into visual structures where matter and corporeality intersect. Rather than describe, her works suggest: images in transit, oscillating between presence and absence, recognition and dissolution, asking to be looked at slowly.

​

What unites the two practices is a shared understanding of painting as a space of friction  in Larraz's case, the friction of gesture and narrative density; in Mangrané's, the friction of surface and accumulated time. The exhibition doesn't propose a single reading but opens an interval: a space where the image stays open, unstable, in tension. The dialogue between the two artists becomes a reflection on how images are built through painting today — not as representation, nor even as an evolution of form, but as a field where the visible is continually negotiated.

​

Laura Larraz (Zaragoza, 1989) lives and works in Berlin. Her painting practice centers on expressive subjects that function as narrative and emotional devices, taking the stage in open-ended scenes shaped by tensions between humor, violence, and affection. Many of her motifs draw on figures and characters from art history and pop culture. She has held solo exhibitions at Chris Sharp Gallery (Los Angeles) and participated in group shows at venues including Tanya Leighton (Berlin), Le Maximum (Los Angeles), and Gattopardo (Los Angeles).

​

Mercedes Mangrané (Barcelona, 1988) lives and works in Barcelona. Her oil painting explores materiality through the observation of "lived-in" surfaces that resonate with bodily sensation, investigating the relationship between matter, memory, and perception from a position between abstraction and representation. She has presented solo exhibitions at Lombardi–Kargl (Vienna), Ana Mas Projects (Barcelona), and the Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid), and participated in group exhibitions at institutions including Fundació Vila Casas (Barcelona), Kunstraum Lakeside (Klagenfurt/Vienna), Centre d'Art Santa Mònica (Barcelona), Bòlit Centre d'Art Contemporani (Girona), and the Artphilein Foundation (Lugano).

​

​

​