Blanca Berlín begins the year with an exhibition by Isabel Muñoz: “La piel y la tierra” (The skin and the soil). National Photography Prize 2016, the Catalan photographer has been a member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando since 2023 and has been awarded numerous prizes throughout her career, one of the most prolific, experimental and innovative in photography in our country.
After eight solo exhibitions at the gallery, this new show allows us to delve deeper into how the artist imbibes the sensory memory that inhabits bodies and places. Skin and soil, two elements that provide her with a scenario in which to generate possible answers to the enigmas that have accompanied us since our remote origins.
Through her inexhaustible exploration of nature, aesthetics and diverse cultures, Isabel Muñoz makes us participants in her universe, so particular, so linked to emotions, so essential, that it becomes a defined language of its own. It is impossible not to recognise in her work the universal forms of love, the manifestations of an eternal desire.
The artist dreams of human geographies and humanises archaic geographies. Skin and Soil. Soil and skin. Scenarios for the exploration of sensorial beauty that the artist transfers to her photographs through sophisticated techniques that she performs with singular mastery. Platinum prints allow her to incorporate textures and colour into the photographs, thus adding a new sensuality to the skin. Tepetype prints, which incorporate sand into the photographic work, bring the viewer symbolically and physically closer to the place from which the image originates. With these works, Isabel Muñoz manages to ensure that photography fulfils its greatest function: to move.
For over forty years, Isabel Muñoz has travelled the world with her camera, portraying human feelings in their purest state. Her gaze has captured an infinite number of subjects: the dignity of primitive tribes and the violence in prisons; the sensuality of dance and the denunciation of oppression; the ecstasy that accompanies extreme suffering and the pain that is impossible to overcome. The catalan artist has photographed practically all the feelings and emotions harboured by the human species, including those of our ancestors.
In 2016 she was recognised with the National Photography Award in Spain, having previously won prestigious awards such as the World Press Photo 1999 and 2004, the Bartolomé Ross Award, the Unicef Award, the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2009, the Madrid Community Award, among others. In 2018 she was one of those invited by the Friends of the Prado Foundation to reflect on the artistic and historical richness of the museum, creating two exclusive pieces for its collection. Isabel has recently been elected member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in the New Image Arts Section.
The Last Island 