Mariela Scafati «NOMBRAR EL MUNDO»

Madrid, Spain

Expanded painting, textile installation, sculpture, queer and transfeminist practice, and collective subjectivity.

Mariela Scafati work

Image credit

© Mariela Scafati

The Movement

Contemporary Art

ArtLovers Tip

Move through the exhibition as if you were entering a community, not a gallery room. Each canvas has been dressed, named, and charged with someone’s voice. The most beautiful part of Nombrar el mundo is realizing that language does not only describe the world — sometimes it helps create one.

Exhibition Highlights - What you’ll see

Mariela Scafati (1973) works “with and from the canvas,” pushing painting beyond image and surface. In her practice, the canvas becomes material, body, clothing, projection, and a space for collective identity.

Nombrar el mundo is Mariela Scafati’s first institutional solo exhibition in Spain. It presents a world being recomposed: from conversation to memory, from object to body, from canvas to clothing, from abstract color to concrete words.

You’re watching:

  • Monochrome canvases dressed with recovered clothes
  • Paintings that become sculptures, bodies, families, and installations
  • Works named after friends — Dai, Devo, Estela, Guille, Lola, Magui, Manu, and Nico
  • Skirts, seams, reverse sides, linings, and painted words becoming emotional material
  • Audio from Radio Eléctrica Artesanal, in collaboration with Lola Granillo, giving voice to the sculpture

The exhibition feels like painting becoming human: dressed, named, suspended, remembered, and shared.

Worth the trip

Yes — especially if you’re interested in painting that moves beyond the wall.

Because Scafati transforms painting into a social and emotional act. Each body-canvas is dressed with clothes donated by friends; through conversations, she asks what sustains them in the present and toward the future, turning those thoughts into painted phrases.

It matters because the exhibition connects language, body, friendship, activism, and imagination. Naming here is not just description — it becomes a way of making someone tangible, personal, and present.

How to experience it

Don’t look for painting only on the wall — look for it in clothes, seams, bodies, and space

Read the painted words as part of the artwork, not as captions

Notice how each piece feels like a person, not just an object

Pay attention to suspension, folds, linings, and reverse sides

Think about friendship as a material — something that literally holds the work together

Madrid, Spain

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