Inés Medina’s “Tridimensionalidad pura” at Galería José de la Mano, Madrid: The Rules Behind a Rediscovered Abstractionist

Points. Vertical lines. Horizontal lines. Red, yellow, blue. No diagonals, no curves, no mixed colours. Out of that deliberately tiny vocabulary, a Basque-based painter spent almost two decades trying to make a flat sheet of paper feel deep. Inés Medina’s “Tridimensionalidad pura” at Galería José de la Mano in Madrid gathers the results — drawings, collages and paintings made between 1978 and 1995 — from 29 October to 12 December 2026.

Inés Medina: Cáceres, Bilbao, New York

According to the gallery, Medina was born in Cáceres in 1950 and has lived in Bilbao since the age of six. She trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of the Basque Country, worked between Madrid and Bilbao in the early 1990s, and in 1995 moved to New York, where she lived for fifteen years. That date matters: the exhibition stops precisely in 1995, so what we see is the body of work she built in Spain before the American chapter began.

Her work is held by the Museo Helga de Alvear in Cáceres, the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Artium Museoa in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the Museo San Telmo in San Sebastián and the Iberdrola collection — a roster that tells you Basque and Extremaduran institutions have been paying attention even when the wider market was not.

The grammar of “pure three-dimensionality”

The exhibition’s full title — Tridimensionalidad pura: la construcción de lo visible, or “Pure Three-Dimensionality: The Construction of the Visible” — is almost a manifesto. The gallery explains that Medina’s research asks how a two-dimensional surface can generate a sense of depth, and that in her work figure and ground share a single experience of three-dimensionality rather than one sitting in front of the other.

The constraints are the point. By forbidding herself diagonals and curves — the classic tools of perspective and illusion — she removes the easy ways of faking depth. What is left is the interaction of colour, interval and density: how a field of points thickens, how parallel lines vibrate, how a saturated primary advances or recedes next to another. The materials listed are modest and precise: graph paper, ink, coloured pencils, collage and paint.

Most striking, perhaps, is the method. From the early 1980s, the gallery notes, Medina used computers and printers to calculate proportions and colour saturation. At a time when personal computing was still a novelty, that was an unusually early use of the computer as a tool for abstraction — a working aid for calculation rather than a medium in itself.

From measure to emotion

The arc of the show is not purely systematic. According to the press release, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the work turns towards time, emotion and inner experience. Two lines of research from 1992–95 carry telling titles: “Desde la pura medida a la emoción” (From Pure Measure to Emotion) and “Despegue o liberación emocional femenina” (Take-off, or Female Emotional Liberation). Abstraction remains the foundation, but the grid begins to carry feeling rather than only data.

The essay accompanying the exhibition, by Sara Abisambra Borrero, offers a compact instruction for viewers: “Cada pintura exige tiempo” — each painting demands time. These are not works that deliver themselves in a glance; their relationships reveal themselves only to sustained looking.

Why this exhibition matters

Spanish geometric abstraction is usually told through a handful of names from the 1950s and 1960s. Medina’s work, made a generation later and largely outside Madrid, complicates that story. It shows a woman artist in the Basque Country pursuing a rigorous, rules-based abstraction — and using computers to do it — through Spain’s democratic transition and the 1980s.

For painters, the exhibition is a lesson in productive limitation: how a strict rule set can open up rather than close down possibilities. For collectors, historical works on paper and canvas from an artist already in several Spanish museum collections are a focused opportunity. The gallery does not publish prices or the number of works on view, so contact it directly.

Galería José de la Mano and the Madrid season

Galería José de la Mano, on Calle Alameda near the Paseo del Prado museum mile, has a programme that regularly revisits twentieth-century Spanish art — a natural home for a historical survey of this kind. The show runs into December, overlapping with the busiest weeks of Madrid’s autumn exhibition calendar.

Visiting information

Galería José de la Mano, Calle Alameda 3, 28014 Madrid. 29 October – 12 December 2026. Opening hours and opening reception are not published on the gallery website, so check before visiting: +34 91 435 01 74, [email protected].

See the official exhibition page, our exhibition listing, and more Madrid and Barcelona openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.