Pablo Genovés’ “Después de los días” at Galería Fernández-Braso, Madrid: Photographs From the Morning After

Disaster images usually arrive in real time: a feed of floods, fires and collapsing coastlines, scrolled past before breakfast. Pablo Genovés has spent more than a decade asking what happens to those pictures once they settle in the mind. Pablo Genovés’ “Después de los días” at Galería Fernández-Braso, Madrid — on view from 5 November 2026 to 9 January 2027 — is his answer: photographs set not during the catastrophe but after it, in the strange, hazy quiet when a world starts to reassemble itself from what is left.

From advertising studios to cathedrals

Born in Madrid in 1959, Genovés began as an advertising photographer — a training in staging, lighting and persuasion that still shows in the precision of his compositions. He studied at Madrid’s Círculo de Bellas Artes, with teachers including Calum Colvin and Spanish photographer Javier Vallhonrat, and continued his studies at Camden Arts Centre in London and the Art Students League in New York.

His exhibition history moves easily between art spaces and unexpected venues: Tides at St Paul’s Cathedral in London (2017), El ruido y la furia at Madrid’s Sala Canal de Isabel II (2014), La unidad dividida por cero at the Centro Niemeyer in Avilés (2019), Paisajes temporales at Galería Marlborough in Barcelona (2020) and Un mundo como el nuestro at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Alicante (2025). His work is in collections including the Aperture Foundation, CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, CAC Málaga and the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid.

After “Precipitados”

To understand the new series you need its predecessor. In Precipitados, shown at Fernández-Braso in 2025 under the title “Reforzar los diques” (Reinforcing the Dykes), Genovés staged interiors of museums, theatres and libraries overwhelmed by water, smoke and debris — the great containers of culture invaded by nature. The gallery describes “Después de los días”, begun in 2022, as that body of work’s continuation, consequence and reply.

Where Precipitados captured the moment of impact, the new images look at the aftermath. They show a world rebuilt from the fragments of what was lost, wrapped in a mist in which memory and reality, seeing and dreaming, blur. The press text quotes a passage that sets the tone — then came “el tiempo de los terremotos, los tsunamis y los grandes incendios”, the time of earthquakes, tsunamis and great fires.

Photography in the age of AI

Genovés has long built his pictures by combining archival photographs, old postcards and his own images — a collage practice that predates the current wave of generative tools by many years. The gallery positions the series between high and low culture, analogue and digital, the real and the imaginary, in a visual culture saturated with images and artificial intelligence. That framing matters. When any scene of ruin can be generated in seconds, Genovés’ slow, hand-assembled images ask a pointed question: what gives a photograph of the impossible its weight? His answer seems to lie in memory — in using images that once really existed as the raw material for scenes that never did.

The exhibition coincides with a book from Exit Publicaciones, gathering photographs from the series with a text by Rosa Olivares, the curator and editor behind EXIT magazine, one of Spain’s key photography publications.

Fernández-Braso and the Salamanca district

Galería Fernández-Braso sits on Calle Villanueva in Madrid’s Salamanca district, a short walk from the Retiro and the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, in the dense cluster of galleries around Villanueva and Claudio Coello. A member of the Arte_Madrid association, the gallery has built a programme that spans Spanish modern masters and contemporary artists — and, with Genovés, sustained attention to photography that thinks like painting.

Why it matters

• For photography collectors: a mature series by an artist represented in the Aperture Foundation and several Spanish museum collections, with an accompanying book.
• For painters and image-makers: a model of how to build a picture from found material, atmosphere and tonal control rather than straightforward documentation.
• For anyone thinking about climate and culture: a calm, unsettling meditation on what survives when the institutions of memory are flooded.

Visiting information

Galería Fernández-Braso, Calle Villanueva 30, 28001 Madrid. 5 November 2026 – 9 January 2027 (the gallery’s page shows 2026 for the closing date, apparently a typo; please confirm). The show opened on 5 November with the artist present. Open Monday to Friday 10:00–13:45 and 17:00–20:00, Saturday 11:00–13:45. Phone +34 915 759 817. See our Después de los días listing, the official Galería Fernández-Braso exhibition page, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.