PACITA ABAD
JULY 2027: MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA, MADRID
8 JULY 2027 – 10 JANUARY 2028
Pacita Abad, 1983. © Pacita Abad Art Estate.
Alison Jacques is pleased to announce Weaving Solidarities, a major European retrospective of Pacita Abad. The retrospective will open at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, from 8 July 2027 to 10 January 2028, before travelling to Mudam, Luxembourg, and then to EMMA–Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland.
The exhibition brings together more than sixty works, most of them large-scale, in which painting is combined with the textile technique known as trapunto: a method of creating padded, stitched patterns that originated in fourteenth-century Italy. Through this technique, Abad gives her large, unstretched canvases a sculptural dimension by layering fabrics, buttons, prints and sequins. These elements connect with non-hegemonic cultural contexts, around which she constructs an artistic language founded on empathy, commitment and solidarity.
Pacita Abad was forced to leave her native Philippines in 1970 after leading a student demonstration against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1965–1986). Exile took her to the United States, where she abandoned her legal studies to devote herself fully to art, which she understood as a catalyst for a profoundly critical view of injustice around the world. Together with her husband, Abad travelled and lived throughout Latin America, Asia and Africa, investigating issues affecting the Global South. She incorporated elements from Indigenous and traditional cultures around the world into her work, challenge Western perceptions of artistic practices often classified as “ethnographic”.
Through this pluralistic visual language, the artist engaged with numerous urgent political and social situations involving injustice and marginalisation. Her subject ranged from political upheaval in the Philippines and the experiences of immigrants in the United States to dramatic events such as wars, displacement and what Abad described as the “torments” caused by colonial and imperialist hegemonies around the world.
Co-organised with MUDAM, Luxembourg, and EMMA–Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland, the exhibition focuses on the sociopolitical connections within Pacita Abad’s work and her distinctive way of reflecting upon barbarity, irrationality and the repression of freedom through circumstances that she knew and experienced personally.