“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Carabanchel), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Carabanchel), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Carabanchel), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Carabanchel), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Carabanchel), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Carabanchel), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Carabanchel), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025 
“Abuela Materna”, MEMORIA (Centro), Madrid, 2025
MEMORIA presents the first solo exhibition by Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín (San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, 1982) in Spain. Divided between its two venues in Madrid, Centro and Carabanchel, the exhibition introduces the practice of Pichillá, a Guatemalan artist of Mayan Tz’utujil descent, who lives and works on the shores of Lake Atitlán.
Abuela Materna [Maternal Grandmother], gathering central issues in Pichillá’s work, proposes a return to the origins, understood not only as those places that have been part of the construction of meanings but also from a perspective of collective ancestry, of the birth of everything. Here, the maternal grandmother refers to a visual metaphor of the fundamental elements. The primitive fire that has provided the most initial sustenance. Or the water, in reference to Lake Atitlán itself and which is deliberately feminine in Mayan Tz’utujil. Or the earth from where beings are born and grow, in reference to the Mother Earth, as both creator and provider.
These allusions are part of a deep sense of reverence for ancestry and its wisdom in the Tz’utujil tradition. From this perspective, their intergenerational transmission is the foundation of cultural resistance against the threat posed by the first contacts with other societies.
In Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín’s practice, the understanding of these processes and experiences have emerged as an expressive mechanism to activate his work as an artist. After his formal studies at the university and intensive contact with artistic parameters based on the West, Pichillá returns to Mayan glyphs and codices to give them a new meaning. Through the revision of traditional weaving techniques, the artist rediscovers the visual codes through which networks of memory, affection and resistance are built.
In this sense, the exhibition presents a living tribute to a collective memory in constant transformation. Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín expands his practice to different formats, textiles, paintings and audiovisuals, which propose a contact with traditional symbolic elements, but also with the gestures of contemporization of the reality from which they are produced. The appropriation of Western techniques subverts the parameters by which they have been conceived. The looms and knots occupy the space and overcome pictorial abstraction, making it objectual and tactile. In the videos, the confrontation of knowledge and ways of seeing the world creates a panorama of the complex melting pot from which Pichillá’s work is formed.
The exhibition, divided between two different spaces, proposes to strain the public’s understanding from a physical gesture between center and periphery and the paths that arise between both.
Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín has participated in solo and collective exhibitions at different international institutions, such as the Barbican Centre, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; 11 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Para Site, Hong Kong; Sesc_Videobrasil Biennial, São Paulo; Denver Art Museum, Denver; MGLC – International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; La Nueva Fábrica, Antigua Guatemala; Hessel Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama, Panama City. Additionally, his work belongs to public and private collections such as Tate Modern, London; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), Buenos Aires; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Banco de España Collection, Madrid; Inter-American Development Bank, Washington; Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York; IL POSTO, Santiago; Quinto Lojo Collection, Guatemala City; Sayago & Pardon – SPACE Collection, California; Luiz Chrysóstomo Collection, Rio de Janeiro; Poma Family Collection, Miami; D+C Family Collection, Miami; Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami, among others.
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