Look the other way. Nicolás Combarro

  February 25, 2026 - August 9, 2026
  During the Museum's regular hours
  According to current rates
Rooms on floor -1

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Curator: Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo  

A collection of works by Nicolás Combarro, who engages in a dialogue with structures—often overlooked—that he encounters as he traverses urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. In this way, he creates a catalog of images that explores the ideologies underlying various types of architecture.

The exhibition 'Mirar a otro lado' (Looking Away) presents a cross-analysis of six of Nicolás Combarro's latest series: 'Serie Negra' (Black Series), 'Arquitectura oculta' (Hidden Architecture), 'Arquitectura espontánea' (Spontaneous Architecture), 'Desvelar Desplazar' (Reveal Displace), 'Soterranei' and 'La materia del silencio' (The Matter Museo Universidad de Navarra Silence), the latter part of the Tender Puentes artistic residency project Tender Puentes Museo Universidad de Navarra.

Nicolás Combarro (A Coruña, 1979) starts from an encounter with reality, establishing a dialogue with buildings, their remains or structures, which normally go unnoticed and which the artist finds as he travels through urban, semi-urban or rural areas. These vestiges are the starting point for his work. After documenting and researching them, he intervenes and photographs these remains of industrial buildings, abandoned structures, self-built constructions, foundations, shelters, and places of confinement and repression. He has thus formed a catalog of images and documentation that allow him to investigate the ideologies hidden behind various types of architecture, but also how the relationships between reality and fiction, memory and oblivion, or between the individual and the collective, are articulated in the construction of the visual regime.

'Materia del silencio,' his most recent project, takes its cue from Centelles’ photograph 'Bram Concentration Camp,' which is part of the MUN collection. Building on this photograph, the series focuses on creating images of the sites and architectural remnants where the concentration camps designed by the Spanish and French regimes between 1936 and 1947 were located. Combarro undertakes a documentary and on-site journey that documents the remains of these infrastructures through a series of nocturnal photographs of the spaces once occupied by these structures, with their architectural vestiges illuminated. The symbolic revelation of these spaces—a metaphor for events erased from the nation’s memory—simultaneously represents the shadow of an ideological system that acted against respect for human life throughout Europe.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

Wednesday, February 25, 7 p.m.

Masterclass with the artist and curator. Nicolás Combarro and Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo