Nassra Musa’s “We accept her, one of us!” at Galería Daniel Cuevas, Madrid: In Praise of the In-Between

The title reads like a chant of welcome — one that can sound, depending on who hears it, like an embrace or a threat. Nassra Musa: We accept her, one of us! at Galería Daniel Cuevas, Madrid turns that ambiguity into painting. Opening on 14 November 2026, it is the first solo exhibition at the gallery for the Madrid-born painter, born in 2000, and it is populated by creatures that are neither quite human, animal nor plant — bodies in transit, looking for a place that will let them stay.

A young painter with a fast-growing CV

Musa graduated in Fine Arts with distinction from the Universidad de Málaga in 2022. She went on to a master’s in character design at U-Tad (2023) and a master’s in interdisciplinary artistic production at the University of Málaga (2025) — an unusual combination that helps explain the strong sense of invented beings in her work. In 2026 alone she completed residencies at Studio Kura in Japan and the Burren College of Art in Ireland, held the solo show Merodeadores at the Sala Chema Cobo in Málaga’s Faculty of Fine Arts, and won second prize at the Premios de Pintura de la Ciudad de Badajoz. Her group exhibitions include shows in Berlin, Barcelona, London and Marbella, and she appeared with Galería Daniel Cuevas at the Estampa fair in 2025 and in the gallery’s group show Extra-Painting.

Bodies that turn into landscape

According to the gallery, Musa’s oil paintings depict hybrid identities in which landscape, architecture and the human figure fragment, mutate and merge into a single organism. Figure and ground blur so thoroughly that it becomes hard to say whether a body is dissolving into terrain or terrain is taking on a body. Her figures adapt by mutating to environments that do not fully accept them.

Nature, in these canvases, is not scenery. The artist describes it in the press release as “una fuerza activa que irrumpe y transforma” — an active force that bursts in and transforms. That is a very different idea from the calm landscape tradition; it is closer to the restless, metamorphic worlds of fantasy illustration and folklore, which she cites alongside cinema and oral mythology as sources.

The monster as a home

The gallery is candid that the images can look threatening at first sight. But it presents them as a metaphor for everything that refuses to fit fixed categories of identity, territory or culture. Migration, memory and personal experience run through the work. The figure of the monster or the outsider, usually something to be expelled, becomes instead a site of belonging. The gallery calls this an aesthetic of the “in-between”.

Seen this way, the exhibition title is a double-edged gift. To be “accepted” as “one of us” means being recognised — but by whom, and on what terms? Musa’s creatures answer by building their own community out of difference.

Galería Daniel Cuevas and Chamberí

Galería Daniel Cuevas is on Calle Santa Engracia in Chamberí, a residential district just north of Madrid’s historic centre. Giving a solo exhibition to a painter born in 2000 shortly after including her in a group show is a vote of confidence that collectors tend to notice.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

For collectors interested in emerging Spanish painting, this is an early chance to see a substantial body of work by an artist whose residencies, prize and institutional solo show all fall in the same year. First gallery solo shows are often where a painter’s vocabulary is set. For painters, Musa’s approach is worth studying for how it fuses character design with oil painting. Invented beings risk looking like illustration; dissolving them into landscape, and letting the ground eat the figure, is one way she keeps them painterly.

Visiting information

Galería Daniel Cuevas, C/ Santa Engracia 6, Bajo Centro, 28010 Madrid. 14 November 2026 – 9 January 2027; opening Saturday 14 November, 11:00–14:30. Open Monday 16:00–19:30, Tuesday–Friday 10:30–14:00 and 16:00–19:30, Saturday 11:00–14:00, and by appointment. Tel. +34 913 08 15 69, [email protected]. See the gallery’s exhibition page, our Nassra Musa Madrid listing, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.