EXHIBITORS SOLO SHOW 2025 – SWAB Barcelona Art Fair

SOLO SHOW

SOLO 2025 proposes a collaboration network among independent European projects, articulated around the solo show format as a unit of collaboration. A single voice can also be a plural voice: that of the collective, the self-managed space, the shared authorship. At this intersection between the individual and the common, the program finds its place.

At a moment of crisis in this relationship, marked by tensions between the hegemony of late-capitalist individualism and the growing search for social reconstruction, the program reflects on how the personal and the common can dialogue and mutually enrich each other within the artistic field.

The goal of SOLO is to promote co-production and collaborative practice through exhibitions that can take the form of an individual show or a proposal built from a shared perspective, generating a collective experience that reflects the diversity of languages and modes of operation present in the independent scene.

The proposal aims to generate lasting ties that enable the co-production of exhibition projects, strengthening both the sustainability of the participating spaces and the creation of new circuits for the circulation of independent art.

The project is supported by the Fundació Vila Casas, which acts as a strategic collaborating entity.

LIST OF EXHIBITORS

Atoi (Bilbao)
BAM projects (Bordeaux)
C U AT SADKA (Krakow)
Espai19 (Barcelona)

Galeria Szczur (Poznan)
JULIO (Paris)
Malpaís (Barcelona)

Atoi (Collaboration with Fundació Vila Casas)

ATOI is a space for experimentation in the production and exhibition of contemporary art, operated by the artist-run cooperative Tractora and located in Bilbao. Since its creation in 2020, it has hosted solo exhibitions, organized public programs, and welcomed invited artist residencies. Over its five years of activity, ATOI has closely collaborated with artists such as Idoia Zabalera, Iñaki Garmendia, Ibon Aranberri, Laia Estruch, Gerard Ortín, and Claudia Pagès, among others.

Proposal

ATOI presents a solo show by Idoia Leache (Burlata, 1999).
Idoia’s work begins with the road as a space of tangible materiality. Using everyday objects such as traffic signs, tires, and more recently, car bodywork, the artist develops formal processes in which the relationship between bodies—her own and those in her immediate environment—plays a central role.
Once in the studio, she creates open forms shaped by the physical interaction she has had with these objects. As a result, the empty space they enclose or suggest often becomes the site of meaning.

BAM projects

BAM projects emerged as a nomadic structure, supporting artists through context-specific projects and process-based practices. Since 2023, it operates from a permanent space in Bordeaux, articulated around two axes: a gallery focused on experimental proposals by emerging and mid-career artists, and a cabinet of curiosities assembling heterogeneous voices across mediums and geographies. Attentive to materiality, textures, and techniques, BAM projects favors works that open poetic, narrative, or oneiric dimensions. Beyond exhibition-making, it engages with art as a form of knowledge ; critical, sensorial, and affective ; where artistic gestures resist categorization and invite renewed modes of attention, perception, and interpretation.

Proposal

BAM Projects presents a solo exhibition by Camille Benbournane, featuring a selection of ceramics and textile works that evoke the remnants of speculative fictions she patiently constructs across her practice. Fossilized creatures, shells, corals, fountains, and imagined ruins emerge as traces from a post-human mythology ; fragments of resilience embedded in matter. Each piece is a chapter from a non-linear narrative, where organic forms and invented rituals suggest hybrid temporalities. Benbournane’s work engages with the porous boundary between artifact and fiction, weaving a tactile cosmology in which memory, fantasy, and survival coalesce in sculptural language.

C U AT SADKA

C U AT SADKA is in artist-run exhibition space founded by Agnieszka Szostek and Michael Biber, located in Kraów at Sadka 12, which is also the origin of its name. Since Octobre 2021, the old from around the world. So far, we have organized 20 exhibitions, including 5 international shows in New York, Virginia, Berlin, Paris and Warsaw.

Proposal

Gallery C U AT SADKA will present Agnieszka Szostek’s solo show at Swab Barcelona. She will showcase Gargoyles, a wall piece inspired by the tradition of fools in art history — guardians and silent spectators symbolizing judgment and surveillance. The central work, Maximum Visibility (working title), references the public square as a space of exposure and observation. Both works are part of Szostek’s broader project Mirror City, exploring control, visibility, and identity, while reflecting on the artist’s dual role as both the observer and the observed.

Espai 19 (Collaboration with Fundació Vila Casas)

Espai19, based in La Salut neighborhood of Barcelona, was founded in January 2023 as a space to foster dialogue around multidisciplinary artistic practice and contemporary culture through exchanges between emerging and established artists. It presents work from a variety of fields, media, and contexts, emphasizing artistic value over prevailing trends or canons. The gallery is committed to both national and international art.

Espai19 is currently developing a solid program aimed at promoting its artists within the contemporary art scene and increasing their visibility both nationally and internationally. These exhibition projects are complemented by a range of significant events that go beyond the conventional exhibition format.

Proposal

For SWAB 2025, Eduard Gil Alsina invites us to contemplate not only the image but its potential for change and openness. Using repetition as a tool, he proposes practicable movements where pictorial reiteration reveals the collapse of meaning rather than reinforcing it. His work explores the space between narrative and form, painting and world. The paintings embrace a void, with forms repeating like echoes that connect the pieces. The image becomes a language, a surface of thought. For Gil, seeing no longer means understanding—practice opposes the collapse of a bridge.

* Part of the pieces were created with support from the Felícia Fuster Foundation’s Young Creation Grants.

Galeria Szczur

Galeria Szczur is an independent art space from Poznań, founded in 2023 by a group of young artists. Conceived as an open, experimental and community-driven platform, it challenges the conventions of institutional art. Szczur supports emerging voices, embracing interdisciplinarity, bold formal experimentation and reflections on today’s urgent issues – from ecology to new technologies. With its raw, unpolished space and unconventional programme, the gallery has quickly become one of the most promising initiatives on Poland’s young art scene.

Proposal

At SWAB, Galeria Szczur presents Andrzej Staniek, co-founder of the gallery and a bold young voice on Poland’s emerging art scene. His practice embodies Szczur’s spirit of experimentation and independence, moving beyond painting to explore sculpture, 3D media and object-based work. Staniek investigates speculative ecologies and the agency of non-human actors, imagining how different forms of intelligence and materiality might communicate or coexist. His artistic vision is rooted in curiosity and risk-taking, positioning him as one of the most distinctive representatives of a generation unafraid to question established artistic norms.

JULIO (Collaboration with Fundació Vila Casas)

Julio is a space founded in 2016 by María Ibáñez Lago and Constanza Piaggio in the Parisian neighborhood of Ménilmontant.
Created to promote and experiment with contemporary art, Julio focuses on building connections between contemporary Latin American artists and the French art scene.

Julio brings together established and emerging artists through an exhibition format called Assemblage#. Curators are invited to engage with this format, or Julio itself takes on the curatorial role.
The space produces approximately seven exhibitions per year at its location on 13 rue Juillet, as well as in partner venues, with a strong commitment to making contemporary art accessible to all audiences.

Proposal

Julio’s participation in SOLO is conceived as a choral gesture. Here the exhibition opens up to multiple voices and perspectives, proposing a shared dialogue: exploring how the common and the singular intertwine to generate new forms of memory and aesthetic experience.

Julio presents four artists whose work explores processes of memory deconstruction.
Using photographic images composed of natural elements and fragments of artworks, Constanza Piaggio intervenes directly on the photographic paper, tearing its surface in a deliberate gesture of rupture.Zoé Brunet-Jailly’s paintings function like a game of memory; they are fragments of recollection encapsulated in matter, which take on new meaning when viewed up close. In his Plantación series, Martin Kaulen uses natural elements tied to extractivism to replicate forms of colonial memory.Damián Caccia evokes forgetting through the loss of the image, whether by fading or superimposition.

Malpais

Malpaís (mal.pəˈis)
1 n. Geology. A recent lava field with a rugged, barren, and arid surface. Also refers to the lava that forms it.
2 n. A territory in the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The Malpaís is a reservation where a population lives outside the bounds of the technological dystopia.
3 n. An independent art space and production venue founded by artists in 2020, located between Marina del Port and the Zona Franca in Barcelona. Its annual public program includes exhibitions, workshops, and events, and its curatorial line promotes artistic collaboration and connections between the local and international cultural scenes.

Proposal

Malpaís presents a solo booth dedicated to the Swiss-Catalan artist Lena Laguna Diel, who held her first solo exhibition in Spain at our space in the La Marina del Port neighborhood of Barcelona in 2024. The proposal marks a return by the artist to a purely pictorial language, where the psychology of color takes on a central role. This approach is rooted in her training at the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe, where she was a student of Franz Ackermann, and it unfolds as a critical inquiry into chromaticism and its capacity to structure forms, rhythms, and tensions within the pictorial language.