Jacobo Castellano

Jacobo Castellano (born 1976, Jaén, Spain) is a Spanish artist who lives and works in Madrid. He graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Granada in 2000 and has developed a sculptural practice since the late 1990s, complemented by drawing, photography, painting and installation. His work is deeply connected to memory, particularly the memories of childhood and family life, and to the histories embedded in everyday objects and materials. Castellano frequently retrieves discarded or obsolete objects, furniture, toys and pieces of wood, recontextualising them through sculpture and assemblage and allowing their material traces and previous uses to become part of new narratives. Wood has remained a constant thread throughout his practice. Rather than treating found materials as neutral elements, Castellano approaches them as carriers of personal and collective histories. Objects associated with domestic environments and childhood are transformed through processes of construction, alteration and recombination, producing works in which memory is conveyed through material presence. His practice is also informed by his Andalusian background, where traditions and religious imagery form part of the cultural environment surrounding his memories. The resulting works often move between the familiar and the uncanny, combining a playful attention to objects with an awareness of loss, disappearance and the passage of time. This relationship between objects, memory and cultural tradition was particularly evident in *Las calles y los cuerpos*, presented at the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid in 2022. Conceived specifically for the museum's Chapel and Gallery 9, the exhibition drew on Castellano's study of the sculptural and architectural traditions of the Renaissance and Baroque, including his visits to the Museo Nacional de Escultura and his research into the reverse side of Berruguete's altarpiece of San Benito el Real. The resulting works created a material and spatial fiction that also examined the collective forms through which religious devotion and popular traditions are publicly expressed. Castellano has presented his work in solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including Sala Alcalá 31 in Madrid, Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, Centro José Guerrero in Granada, Museo Barjola in Gijón, CAAC – Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, ARTIUM in Vitoria-Gasteiz, and Kunsthalle São Paulo. His 2024 exhibition *El espacio entre los dedos*, curated by Tania Pardo at Sala Alcalá 31, brought together works produced across different moments of his career and offered an overview of his continued engagement with sculpture, material and memory. Other significant exhibitions include *riflepistolacañón*, presented at the CAAC in Seville in 2018 and subsequently at ARTIUM in 2019, and *Las calles y los cuerpos* at the Museo Patio Herreriano in 2022. His work is held in numerous public collections, including ARTIUM Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, CAAC Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, CGAC Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Fundación Botín, MUSAC, TBA21–Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, FRAC des Pays de la Loire, the DKV Collection and the Kunstsammlung der Mobiliar. He received the Cervezas Alhambra Prize for Emerging Art in 2017. Across sculpture, installation, photography, painting and drawing, Castellano continues to investigate how ordinary materials can retain and reactivate traces of individual and collective experience, turning objects marked by use, absence and time into forms through which memory can be reconstructed and transformed.