The Architecture of Power. Kepa Garraza
The Architecture of Power brings together for the first time a selection of works from some of Kepa Garraza’s most representative series —POWER, Propaganda, Nuevo Monumentalismo, This is the End of the World as You Know It and WAR— forming a small retrospective that traces more than a decade of research into one of the central themes of his artistic practice: the visual construction of power.
Far from viewing power solely as a political structure, Garraza approaches it as a complex system of images. Monuments, official portraits, press photographs, newspaper front pages, public sculptures, military iconography and scenes of conflict all form part of a visual language carefully constructed to legitimise certain forms of authority and shape our perception of reality. The exhibition aims precisely to dismantle this symbolic architecture that underpins official narratives.
Garraza’s work operates in a deliberately ambiguous territory, where reality and fiction intertwine until they become almost indistinguishable. Through paintings of extraordinary technical precision, the artist reinterprets historical and contemporary images, alters their contexts and proposes alternative scenarios that introduce doubt where we would normally find certainties. His works do not offer answers; they question the mechanisms by which history, memory and the present are constructed, represented and consumed.
