As part of the Flash programme at Barcelona Gallery Weekend, Kepa Garraza presents “Horses”, a selection of six works from the series of the same name.

The series is conceived as a visual journey through the history of equestrian portraiture, a genre which, from Classical Greece to the present day, has served kings, emperors, and generals to affirm, through the image, the dominance achieved through arms. Garraza takes as his starting point some of the most representative works of this tradition and creates versions that faithfully reproduce the technique and scale of the originals, but introduce a decisive alteration: the disappearance of the rider. The horse remains, richly harnessed or in full action, whilst the place of the subject—the body that underpinned the entire discourse of power—is left empty.

That absence is the true theme of the series. By removing the figure of the ruler, Garraza lays bare the symbolic framework that underpinned his authority: the gesture, the saddle, the staging. What remains is not a neutral void, but evidence of just how much of that power depended on the representation itself. It is a continuation, in a different key, of a concern that has run through the artist’s work for years: the relationship between art and propaganda, and how power constructs and manages its own image.

The six works brought together in this exhibition span different periods and geographical areas within that lineage. Alexander the Great harks back to the classical origins of the genre; Philip IV and Charles II evoke the great tradition of Spanish court portraiture; the Duke of Wellington and Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard — the famous Knight of Bayard — belong to the European military and aristocratic imagination; Ottoman warrior shifts the focus to another tradition of equestrian power, broadening the scope beyond the Western canon. Taken together, the works function as fragments of a single reflection: the equestrian portrait as a form of propaganda whose symbolic effectiveness has shown remarkable persistence over the centuries, even though today it may appear, to contemporary eyes, to be an anachronistic language.

With ‘Horses’, Kepa Garraza seeks not only to highlight the continued relevance of these visual codes, but also to invite us to look anew at images we take for granted. By removing the protagonist, the artist transforms each piece into a space for questioning: what remains of power when its body is removed? What does this empty architecture tell us about the mechanisms through which, even today, authority continues to be represented?