Nuria Mora

The word “goo” —a sticky or undefined substance in English— serves as a metaphor for matter in continuous transformation: a state in which everything begins to dissolve to make way for new forms, new territories, and new horizons. In this exhibition by Nuria Mora (Madrid, 1974), everything revolves around the drive for transformation, the desire for change, the concept of risk, and individual challenges as essential engines of the creative process. To explore is to draw personal maps, to build a language of one’s own within uncertainty.

Since her earliest works, the artist has maintained an ongoing dialogue with the city and the urban environment, articulating a site-specific practice that activates space as a field of experimentation, where installation becomes a key tool for re-reading the landscape and transforming public space into an excuse to explore movement and adventure as forms of intuition and risk.

The central piece in the exhibition, a large site-specific installation made from ceramics, sponges, ropes, found objects, wires, and organic materials —evoking the remains of a shipwreck resting on the seabed— pays tribute to that process of erosion and change, where remnants are not losses but treasures. The beauty of what is fragmented after a shipwreck always adopts a new form. What remains, even if broken, is a unique and precious treasure. Shapes that evoke sunken wrecks, unknown creatures, deep oceans, and distant lands. This installation is constructed from fragments collected from the street, used to create new moulds, along with others salvaged from an abandoned porcelain doll factory, pieces modelled by the artist, wires and ropes. The combination of these elements —each with its own story— symbolises the creation of a new reality from fragments of the past, recovering and transforming what is broken into something entirely new. The beauty of imperfection lies not in what is lost, but in what remains and accumulates. Like shipwrecks merging with their surroundings, life’s wounds become part of everyday life, transforming into a new reality. Stories of survival, but also of the possibility of rebirth. A reminder that even after the most devastating storm, something beautiful can emerge from the wreckage.

The exhibition continues with a group of paintings that mark a rupture with the artist’s own trajectory. Personal cartographies that cut across her visual language and here become a sensory journey towards the unrepresented. A willingness to abandon precision in favour of a more fluid and overflowing style, where drawing and painting exchange roles and orders. An invitation to inhabit the notion of the unexplored, like ancient navigators facing unfinished maps and entering “terra incognita”, opening up a symbolic space where intuition and risk act as creative compasses.

Finally, “bitten apples”, a series of ceramic pieces symbolising the first act of human rebellion and free will. A gesture that breaks with passivity and fully enters the realm of experience, knowledge, and risk. It also marks the beginning of humanity as a conscious subject, not representing sin, but the leap into individual awareness. The apple as existential adventure. But also the apple as the trigger for chaos, conflict, and the transformation of the world. The apple as desire. As a seed of radical change, of the unexpected, and of the story that escapes control. The apple as a synonym for adventure and risk.

The exhibition title, “GOO”, makes a direct reference to the eponymous album by Sonic Youth, released in 1990, a record that became a milestone for its radical and transgressive attitude in music. Its cover, illustrated by Raymond Pettibon, depicts two characters taken from a real photograph and transformed into a “pulp” fiction of crime and escape.