The first major solo exhibition by Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González, artists whose joint practice constitutes one of the most rigorous and committed contributions to Spanish contemporary art in the field of historical, individual and collective memory.
From 12 June to 11 October 2026
Since the 2000s, Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González have been developing an artistic project focused on exploring and recovering the memory held by uninhabited places and on materialising the invisible traces that political, social, or emotional history has left on them.
This exhibition will bring together for the first time all the works created to date on the Padre Jofré Psychiatric Hospital in Bétera (Valencia), on which they have been working since 2017. These works have been exhibited in various individual and collective exhibitions, both in Spain and abroad, and are accompanied by a series of newly produced photographs and videos. Through a variety of materials and media, this project rescues, both materially and symbolically, the invisible and marginal aspects of spaces, transforming memory into poetic gestures, into an archive of human experiences that establishes a dialogue between past and present and generates a reflection on exclusion, abandon and oblivion.
Following one of the programmatic lines that underpin the Museum’s activity, we will link this exhibition to our territory and reach out to the city and its citizens, appealing to their history and heritage. To this end, Gómez and González have conceived a new project that will start from the building of the old jail of Cáceres, where they will carry out their unique mural starters (strappo), acts of poetic rescue, where the material of the walls will be transformed into an archaeological record, a tangible vestige of the lives that inhabited them and the social and political contexts that conditioned them.
An exhibition curated by María Jesús Ávila, artistic director of Helga de Alvear Museum, which will bring together artistic creation, memory, territory and community, the fundamental pillars of the Helga de Alvear Museum’s mission.
This exhibition, organised by Helga de Alvear Museum in collaboration with TEA Tenerife, will have a second chapter in Tenerife in 2027.
María Jesús Ávila
Deputy Artistic Director of Museo Helga de Alvear. With more than 30 years of experience in the field of museums and curatorship, she has been Chief Curator of the Museu do Chiado-Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon (1994-2007) and head of the Culturgest collection, Lisbon (2008). For fifteen years she has been at the helm of the Helga de Alvear Foundation Visual Arts Centre (2008-2020) and Museo Helga de Alvear (2022-September 2023).
She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Extremadura and has been an associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Extremadura (1995-1999) and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2005-2006).
In her career that combines research, teaching, curating and museology, she has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, including recent exhibitions in the context of PhotoESPAÑA After All (Madrid, 2025), Actuating / Sequencing (Santander, 2024), More than Space (2021) and …And There Was Time (2015), as well as the major study on Surrealismo em Portugal 1934-1952 (Badajoz, Lisbon and Madrid, 2001-2002). Among the artists curated are Ángel Duarte (2022-2023), Mitsuo Miura (2018), Jürgen Klauke (2017), Jean-Marc Bustamante (2016), Heim Semke (2005), Sá Nogueira (1998), Ana Hatherly (1997) and Mário Eloy (1996).
She has been a member of the curatorial team for the Foro Sur fair in Cáceres (2003 and 2007–2011), curator of the 10th Biennial of Graphic Art in Cáceres (2023) and of the exhibitions held in the context of the same Biennial, and co-curator of its 11th edition (2025).
She is co-author of the first two catalogues raisonné produced in Portugal dedicated to Joaquim Rodrigo and the multiple works of Julião Sarmento, and is the sole author of numerous publications on modern and contemporary art, including the book Ortega Muñoz, essays for catalogues and articles on art, museography and conservation in specialized magazines.
She has been part of research teams and projects at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the University of Extremadura, has co-directed research projects, master's degrees and doctoral theses, and has directed and taught courses and lectures.
In addition, she has been a member of numerous award juries, such as the 14th Edition of the Sala el Brocense Plastic Arts Awards (2011) and the 9th International Photography Award of the UNESCO Centre of Extremadura (2025), and selection committees for plastic arts grants, including those organised by the Regional Ministry of Culture of the Regional Government of Extremadura, and for artistic projects such as Supertrama (2019) and Filare (2021). She is currently a member of the Advisory Council for Plastic Arts of the Provincial Council of Cáceres.
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