Family Ties

FAMILY TIES

Exhibition by María José Gómez Redondo and Carmen Gómez Redondo

Palacio Los Serrano
April 16 – May 23, 2026

Family Ties emerges from the intimate artistic reflection of two sisters who explore, through their work, the complex web of relationships shaped within the domestic sphere.

Carmen Gómez Redondo presents bird’s-eye view landscapes that, through their materiality, evoke warmth, intimacy, and affection. Her work recalls childhood play, when the living room carpet became a territory inhabited by imaginary creatures. Here, the landscape transforms into a symbolic space—both an interpretation of the outside world and a projection of the most familiar inner realm.

Exhibition Poster Palacio de los Serrano Ávila

Bird’s-Eye View Landscapes

María José Gómez Redondo showcases large-scale photographic prints where layered images intertwine, constructed through the emotions and relationships of those who inhabit a home. These vertically structured textile pieces delve into the feelings that surface through seemingly trivial moments. Across her work, scale and texture act as a subtle framework through which these bonds are created and explored.

The physical presence of the works, together with their tactile and visual qualities, simultaneously evoke two spaces: the natural realm of the forest—serving as a metaphor for life and growth—and the constructed space of the home, understood as a cultural environment that enables an evocative reading of memory.

The media chosen by the artists—photography and textile art—though distinct, find a shared language in this carefully staged exploration of inner dialogue, one that resides within each of us, in the intimate space we call home.

More information about the exhibited work 

Genealogies
Paths in the Forest
Words
Herbarium
Archaeologies of the Invisible

Spanish

During

 

During. Collage of Printing and Photographic Transfers on Fabric 300 x 200 cm. 2024

If we observe the lines on our hands, there are no vertical ones.

I have constructed a hand traversed from the index finger to the wrist by a large seam, from which portraits transferred onto fabric emerge—images of my face and that of my family over decades.

A constellation of lines on a white wall, some letters, each seemingly initials.

Several people have measured themselves against the wall, marked the line of their height at that moment, and placed their initials; as if they were countries on a map, they have marked their borders.

Since I was in a classroom, I thought these marks might belong to students who are used to measuring themselves on the walls of their homes. People who inscribed their hopes or their desire to transcend their boundaries, a certain nostalgia for a lost centre.

Our intimate self includes the childhood of the past.

The palm of the hand is an involuntary summary of our history—how we grasp things, how we hold on to avoid falling. That hand is built along with us, reaching for the other hands around us.

Like any collage, it visually creates bonds that connect the images, while at the same time maintaining the cracks that separate them. The seams seek to link differences, creating a tension—a union-separation similar to what happens in the skin when a wound forms.

The difference in scale between the images enables a mental rather than spatial relationship among them, allowing them to serve as an index of events in search of temporal order.

We shed our skin during the winter 27 x 35 cm

Transfers on fabric and photographic prints on paper January-April 2025

This is part of a series of collages with images created during the "During" process and which mark the beginning of a new body of work, "Family Ties." It represents a shift from constructing visual relationships with a primarily intellectual interaction of images to a more spatial construction, like different actors on a stage.

The protagonist is the home and the situations we experience within it: from the most banal, the seasonal change of clothes in the closet, to the most profound, evoked by the faded image behind it and the faces transferred onto the fabrics, which are metaphors for inner change over time.

Archaeology of the invisible.

Since our childhood we have been attracted to empty mansions, places that show in their ruins the remains of their former uses, places inhabited by treasures and ghosts. I remember having visited powerful places of industrial archaeology in Segovia, old brick factories, electricity factories, photographic laboratories or the Faience Factory, all of them empty and open to adolescent curiosity.

I still have some of the treasures I found there: an architect's tape measure, some negatives of military photographs on gelatine and glass.

I also remember my desire to photograph ghosts with long shutter exposures in places lit by torchlight.

This space of the abattoir of Monzón de Campos is a space saved from collapse as were not those others, which I remember with the affection reserved for an old acquaintance. However, this space is also open to memory. Elements of industrial archaeology emerge, questioning its new use, this new coexistence with art, which always allows us to invoke what is outside our limits.

Collage as an artistic technique is both a tool of destruction and creation; it is the first attempt at sustainable, recycled art. These stones are assemblages of images on building rubble that are placed on the ground to invent a future or a past time. 

Nature occupies the artificial space when people leave, which is why I look down on this room, which could be invaded by the countryside around it. The tiles show us a space that wants to look clean, as opposed to the dirt that comes from the beings that live and die. The ceramics have that air of improved nature that does not resist returning to the earth, but retains the brightness of what was once its function.

I pick up rationalist squares from the tiled walls to frame my family ties like those traced in white kitchens and bathrooms like this room.

I enjoy working with photographs as representations of something and as objects in themselves. Their deterioration becomes a metaphor for the passage of time, oblivion and memory. I recycle images, phrases, poems, creating new texts, initially separated from a linear narrative. These ethereal photographs recover fragments of printed media. I did this to construct pictorial poems that subtly reflect the excesses of contemporary visual culture. In my case, my work reflects my self-representations over time and my aging process. The blackboards, paradoxically, look to me like paleolithic mobile screens with their social media messages.

Linktree https://linktr.ee/mariajosegomezredondo

https://mariajosegomezredondo.wordpress.com

Blog https://arteyproceso.blogspot.com/

Vertical garden

 Vertical garden, Maria Jose Gomez Redondo September 2022

Being all expelled from Paradise, we miss the garden and grow another to keep it in the human sphere; it offers us found rest through a piece of nature contact.

Maria Jose Gomez Redondo fits her vertical garden to enjoy limited vegetation and isolated from its environment, which is offered to observation meanwhile growing to assume the difficulties of a hostile location. This artwork represents a humanized jungle gifted with an odd disposition that depicts a map or a drawing made for contemplation.

She presents photographs made in several supports: fabric, collage in which printed, dyed, and photochemical images, they are mixed and showing us a close-up panorama from the recent years of the artist.

Water Flowers (2013- 2022) is a collage series that roll us back to childhood games: these flowers seem to dance floating in a pond with many reflections; colourful rainbows that we had seen for the first time in an oil stain in a puddle.

Shadow Flowers (2021) is a seven photograph series made on fabric in which small stems appear to wave in sheets wrapping themselves in their own shadow; they are winter pictures where the darkness looks for artificial light causing a mystery sensation.

Paper Flowers (2005) are collages that review the photographic image condition; the flowers suffer a mix of re-photographic processes: They became from natural to artificial living in a parallel reality like Bioy Casares’ short story “la invención de Morel.”

Vertical Garden: Winter and summer (2021) are two mural photographs printed on fabric, on which the artist self-portraits in her vertical garden as a background curtain; she offers us a theatrical garden that impersonates to be a forest; she prepared a grove to turn into a playground and imaginary encounters.

More information

The reality (Summer 2003)

By María José Gómez Redondo

I look at my thoughts like clouds: there is an idea that I stop, and another that escapes me.

We usually define reality as an independent fact of our will and thought as something intimate that happens to us, not real or illusory.

However, our thoughts stain our reality, and these become our way of looking and acting.

I will wait for a sweeter achievement.

One only among many words.

 I will wake up cheated.

Where the mind is stuck.

Behind the shield of grief.

I almost feel it's true.

It seems to be only pain.

It is held in the soul.

María José Gómez Redondo

María José Gómez Redondo (Valladolid, 1963) is a Spanish contemporary artist specializing in photography.

Professional Career

She began her art studies at the School of Applied Arts in Segovia and later earned a degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Madrid, where she also completed her doctoral studies. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid.

Gómez Redondo attended the Contemporary Art Workshops at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, studying with the contemporary artist Richard Artschwager. She also participated in the Photography Creation Course at the Gibson & Coleman Studio during the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France.

Her background in painting informs her approach to photography, allowing her to explore her subjects with a strong visual sensibility. In her work, she seeks to engage the viewer by creating an evocative atmosphere, offering narrative clues while preserving areas of mystery.

All her work from the end of 2001 and throughout 2002 wonders about the support of image. She uses a work technique based on the collage and the feedback of different processes. In her previous work, she conceived with a flat collage approach. That did not affect the purely photographic final presentation. In the present work, the image's formal construction posed as related fragments are made very clear. Pieces of paper with digital prints, transfers on the photographic emulsion, imprints on different supports make the image acquire a technical depth in keeping with its visual complexity.

I had drawn