Chema Madoz returns to Madrid with new photographs that once again engage with the everyday. On May 5, as part of the PHotoESPAÑA Festival, the Elvira González Gallery will present his fifth solo exhibition at this venue, featuring recent work created between 2024 and 2025.
Chema Madoz (Madrid, 1958) is a central figure in contemporary Spanish photography, known for transforming everyday objects into images with a strong conceptual charge. Since the 1990s, he has developed a unique visual language that uses everyday objects as a starting point to construct scenes that appear simple yet conceal multiple meanings. He does not work from anecdote, but rather from a form of visual poetry that invites us to look twice at what we think we understand at first glance. His career is marked by milestones such as the retrospective *Objetos 1990–1999* at the Reina Sofía Museum—the first such exhibition dedicated to a living Spanish photographer at the museum—and the National Photography Prize, which he received in 2000 along with the PHotoESPAÑA Award that same year.
A new series to see things differently
The exhibition at the Elvira González Gallery brings together recent works created between 2024 and 2025, all faithful to his method: black-and-white images constructed from everyday objects, photographed in his studio using natural light. Nothing is improvised, yet nothing starts from a fixed idea either. Madoz works from the discovery, in a highly intuitive way, until he manages to transform an object into something else. As he himself has explained, he is interested in the idea of discovery, of detecting the mystery hidden within the seemingly ordinary and transforming it into an image that captures that sense of strangeness.
In his photographs, there is no overt digital manipulation or post-production effects; the trick lies in the physical construction of the scenes, in the choice of angle, light, and the exact moment the shot is taken. It is patient, almost artisanal work, in which the studio functions as both a laboratory and a stage.