Madrid
COLNAGHI MADRID
On now
- Colnaghi Madrid is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition The Danger of Beauty, in collaboration with and curated by Luis Berenguer which explores the shifting meanings and enduring influence of beauty across historic and contemporary art. Bringing contemporary works by Hamish Pearch, Cece Philips and Liu Bin into dialogue with paintings by El Greco, the Circle of Francisco de Zurbarán, Juan van der Hamen and Juan de Arellano, the exhibition considers beauty as a historically contingent idea, shaped by religious belief, social convention and structures of authority. Across European art, beauty has served as an expression of divine perfection, an outward sign of virtue and status, and a means through which material abundance might be both celebrated and possessed. Yet such images have always carried an awareness of impermanence: flowers wilt, food decays, bodies age and objects pass from one owner to another. The exhibition traces the survival and transformation of these concerns in contemporary practice, examining the relationships between beauty, desire, ownership and display. Pearch’s sculptural assemblages test the boundaries between the organic and the manufactured, placing materials in states of apparent instability, growth or deterioration. Philips draws upon portraiture, domestic painting, archival sources and memory to explore the politics of looking, constructing interiors in which intimacy, privacy and power remain unsettled. Liu Bin’s paintings similarly complicate the seductive qualities of the image, revealing beauty as a site of ambiguity rather than certainty.Description
The Danger of Beauty
Until 29 Oct 2026
Recent past exhibitions
- Colnaghi Madrid is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition, Everyday Poetry: Spanish Still Life Painting of the 17th and 18th Centuries, presented in partnership with Artur Ramon. Everyday Poetry: Spanish Still Life Painting of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries is devoted to the emergence and development of the bodegón in Spain from the early seventeenth century to the Enlightenment. Bringing together approximately thirty works by artists including Juan van der Hamen, Juan de Zurbarán, Tomás Hiepes, Josefa de Óbidos, Pedro de Camprobín and Luis Meléndez, the exhibition traces the evolution of Spanish still life from its early austere formulations to the more elaborate and decorative compositions of the later period. Far from a minor genre, the bodegón occupied a central position in Spanish painting, offering artists a rigorous framework in which to explore naturalism and pictorial order. The exhibition also highlights the work of Josefa de Óbidos, one of the few women working within the genre, whose paintings combine Sevillian naturalism with a distinctive compositional vitality. The trajectory concludes with the work of Luis Meléndez, whose still lifes of the eighteenth century distil the genre to its essentials, combining precision, sobriety and an almost scientific attention to everyday objects.Description
Everyday Poetry: Spanish Still Life Painting of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Ended 9 Mar 2026