Patricia Dauder’s “SUBMÓN” at ProjecteSD: Drawing the World Beneath the Surface in Barcelona

Look at the image at the top of this page and try to decide what it is. A geological section? A piece of folded fabric? A topographic map seen too close? It is a drawing — Pliegues (Folds), 2023, colour pastel on paper, almost two metres tall and, unusually for a drawing, five and a half centimetres deep. Its author, Patricia Dauder, opens a new solo exhibition this month with her long-standing Barcelona gallery: Patricia Dauder’s “SUBMÓN” at ProjecteSD, from 26 November 2026 to 29 January 2027.

A word to start with

Submón is a Catalan word built from sub (under) and món (world): an underworld, a world beneath. ProjecteSD has not yet published the exhibition text or a list of works, so we will not guess at what hangs on the walls. But the title fits an artist whose recent exhibitions have been called Ground and Underground and Unform, and whose drawings so often look like cross-sections of something buried — strata, sediment, folds of rock compressed over time.

Who is Patricia Dauder?

Born in Barcelona in 1973, Dauder lives and works in the city. Her practice runs across drawing, sculpture, moving image and pictorial work, but drawing is its backbone. Over the past decade she has built a solid institutional record. In 2018 the National Gallery Prague introduced her work at its Trade Fair Palace, she took part in the XIV Bienal de Cuenca in Ecuador, and she made Alineacions, a project for the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. In 2021 La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona’s municipal centre for image culture, gave her the solo exhibition Ground and Underground; in 2024 ARTIUM in Vitoria-Gasteiz presented Unform, and CaixaForum Barcelona included her in the group show Horizonte y Límite. She has also exhibited at Centro Botín in Santander.

Drawing as sediment

What makes Dauder’s drawings distinctive is their physical weight. A work such as Vida Primigenia #1 (2024) is charcoal and pastel on a sheet more than two metres high — the scale of a body, not a sketchbook. Pastel and charcoal are dry, powdery materials; laid down in dense layers they behave almost like deposits, building up surfaces that read as terrain. In Pliegues, the paper itself appears to have become a three-dimensional object, which is where her sculpture and her drawing meet.

There is a quiet lineage here. Catalan art has a long tradition of treating matter as meaning — think of Antoni Tàpies and his walls, or the informalisme of the 1950s. Dauder belongs to a later generation and her touch is cooler and more precise, closer to the scientific illustration or the geological survey than to gestural abstraction. The subject is not the artist’s emotion but processes much larger and slower than any one person: erosion, folding, the formation of ground. Titles such as Vida Primigenia (primordial life) point to deep time.

ProjecteSD and the Barcelona scene

ProjecteSD, run from a ground-floor space on Passatge Mercader in the Eixample, is one of Barcelona’s most internationally connected galleries, known for a rigorous programme that has paired local artists with figures such as Ana Jotta and Allen Ruppersberg, whose joint exhibition O Jogo da Glória is on view there until 6 November. Dauder is a natural fit: an artist with museum credentials who still works on a scale and with a patience that rewards a long, quiet visit. A winter show running through the holidays into late January also gives visitors from outside the city time to plan.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

Large-format drawing is one of the most underrated categories in the market: works on paper are often priced below paintings of the same size, yet Dauder’s sheets carry the presence of painting and the intimacy of the hand. With institutional shows in Prague, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Barcelona behind her, she is an artist whose reputation has been built carefully rather than quickly. For painters, the lesson is technical and conceptual at once: how to make a dry medium feel geological, and how to make abstraction about the world rather than about style.

Visiting information

ProjecteSD, Passatge Mercader 8, Baixos 1, 08008 Barcelona. 26 November 2026 – 29 January 2027. Hours: Tuesday–Friday 11:00–19:00; Saturday by appointment. The gallery’s site lists the opening as both 25 and 26 November, so confirm before you go: +34 934 881 360 or [email protected]. See our SUBMÓN exhibition listing, the official ProjecteSD exhibition page and more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.