The exhibition The Architecture of Power brings together for the first time a selection of works from some of Kepa Garraza’s most representative series —POWER, Propaganda, Nuevo Monumentalismo, We Just Want to Set the World on Fire and WAR— forming a small retrospective that traces more than a decade of research into one of the central themes of his artistic practice: the visual construction of power.

Far from viewing power solely as a political structure, Garraza approaches it as a complex system of images. Monuments, official portraits, press photographs, newspaper front pages, public sculptures, military iconography and scenes of conflict all form part of a visual language carefully constructed to legitimise certain forms of authority and shape our perception of reality. The exhibition aims precisely to dismantle this symbolic architecture that underpins official narratives.

Garraza’s work operates in a deliberately ambiguous territory, where reality and fiction intertwine until they become almost indistinguishable. Through paintings of extraordinary technical precision, the artist reinterprets historical and contemporary images, alters their contexts and proposes alternative scenarios that introduce doubt where we would normally find certainties. His works do not offer answers; they question the mechanisms by which history, memory and the present are constructed, represented and consumed.

In POWER, the artist traces a genealogy of the representation of Western power, from classical antiquity to the present day, showing how art has historically served as an instrument of political legitimisation and propaganda. In Propaganda, he expands on this reflection to analyse the use of images as ideological tools, exploring how art, photography and cinema have contributed to the construction of political, military and revolutionary discourses throughout history.

The works belonging to ‘New Monumentalism’ shift the focus towards public space, symbolically replacing statues of rulers, military figures and national heroes with anonymous figures drawn from social protest. This exercise in fiction does not propose a political alternative, but rather a reflection on the very nature of the monument, authority and the mechanisms through which a society decides who deserves to be remembered.

We Just Want to Set the World on Fire emerged in the wake of the wave of protests that swept across the world following the lifting of restrictions after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kepa Garraza interweaves recreations of images taken by news agencies with fictional scenes that capture the explicit and perpetual conflict caused by the ongoing political, social, ecological and economic changes affecting society. Kepa Garraza highlights the state of a society in constant crisis.

Finally, the recent series WAR offers a reflection that is particularly relevant in the current geopolitical context. Garraza analyses how the representation of war has evolved from heroic glorification to contemporary criticism, focusing on the resurgence of warmongering rhetoric, the normalisation of conflict and the growing capacity of images to simultaneously document, stir emotions and manipulate.

Rather than depicting power, Kepa Garraza examines the images that make it possible. His works reveal how authority needs to be constantly represented in order to exist, how propaganda takes on new forms without losing its effectiveness, and how history continues to be written through seemingly objective images. With a critical, ironic and deeply contemporary perspective, the artist invites the viewer to adopt an increasingly necessary attitude: to be wary of images, to question established narratives and to understand that every representation of power is, ultimately, a construct.

‘The Architecture of Power’ thus offers a journey through the visual mechanisms that have shaped our collective memory for centuries and which continue to determine, today more than ever, the way in which we understand reality.