This summer, a hidden garden in the heart of Madrid becomes the setting for an encounter with some of most imposing and psychologically charged sculptures by Thomas Houseago. For “Thomas Houseago. Sculptures. Banca March Garden,” the British artist’s first exhibition in Spain, seven monumental works are installed across the 1,600-square-meter garden of Banca March’s headquarters on Calle Castelló, a verdant and rarely accessible space in the Salamanca district.
On view through October 30, 2026, the exhibition coincides with Banca March’s centenary, opening a space that is typically closed to the public as part of the institution’s year-long celebration, “A Future with History.” Curated by Anne Pontégnie, the presentation offers something distinctly different from the conventional museum experience. Here, Houseago’s fractured bodies, masks, and figures are encountered gradually, appearing between foliage, alongside ponds, and against the architecture of an early 20th-century building. The result is an exhibition in which sculpture does not simply occupy space. It activates it.
A Rarely Seen Garden Becomes an Open-Air Sculpture Park
Courtesy of the artist, Banca March and Xavier Hufkens Gallery.
© Photography: Pablo Gómez-Ogando.
Courtesy of the artist, Banca March and Xavier Hufkens Gallery.
© Photography: Pablo Gómez-Ogando.
Located at Calle Castelló, 75, Banca March’s garden is something of an oasis within Madrid’s Salamanca district. Spread across more than 1,600 square meters, the landscape combines dense vegetation, water features, and existing works of contemporary art, including sculptures by Cristina Iglesias. Although it shares a city block with the Juan March Foundation, it remains a distinct and unusually private setting, generally opening only for special occasions.
For Banca March’s 100th anniversary, however, the garden is being made accessible to the public through October 30, allowing Houseago’s sculptures to unfold within an environment shaped as much by nature and movement as by architecture.
That setting is especially resonant for an artist whose works often seem to exist somewhere between ruin and construction. Houseago’s sculptures reveal their own making: plaster surfaces remain rough and exposed; iron rods may extend beyond the figure; bodies are fragmented, hollowed out, or deliberately unfinished. Rather than presenting sculpture as a polished and complete object, Thomas Houseago allows process, instability, and vulnerability to remain visible.
Pontégnie describes the human figure as central to his practice. His bodies and masks can appear broken or incomplete, yet they possess an undeniable physical and emotional presence. In the garden, that tension between monumentality and fragility becomes even more pronounced. A figure encountered through the trees can initially appear ancient or archetypal, only to reveal its raw materials and conspicuously contemporary construction upon closer inspection.
From Ancient Figures to Ziggy Stardust
Courtesy of the artist, Banca March and Xavier Hufkens Gallery.
© Photography: Pablo Gómez-Ogando.
Courtesy of the artist, Banca March and Xavier Hufkens Gallery.
© Photography: Pablo Gómez-Ogando.
Among the most striking works in the exhibition is Large Walking Figure I (Leeds), 2013, a nearly five-meter-tall sculpture whose monumental scale gives it an immediate command over the surrounding landscape. The walking figure is one of Houseago’s recurring archetypes, suggesting movement and physical force while also retaining the marks and fractures of its construction.
Also included is the recent Janus-Mirror-Figure, 2025, a work that reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in duality, masks, and the layered histories embedded within the human form. The reference to Janus, the Roman god traditionally associated with beginnings, endings, transitions, and the ability to look in more than one direction, feels particularly apt within an exhibition staged to mark a centenary. Houseago’s figures often look simultaneously backward and forward, drawing on ancient sculpture while speaking in a distinctly contemporary language.
That collision of references is fundamental to Houseago’s practice. Born in Leeds in 1972, the artist studied at Central Saint Martins in London before continuing his education at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. After spending time in Brussels, he moved to Los Angeles in 2004, where he continues to live and work.
Over the course of his career, Thomas Houseago has developed a visual language that moves freely across art history and popular culture. His influences range from classical and ancient sculpture to Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso, while references can also extend to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and George Lucas’s Darth Vader. These seemingly disparate sources meet in works that feel both prehistoric and futuristic, theatrical and deeply human.
His sculptures have been shown internationally at institutions including the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Royal Academy in London, the Galleria Borghese in Rome, and Storm King Art Center in New York.
Thomas Houseago Examines A Future with History
Courtesy of the artist, Banca March and Xavier Hufkens Gallery.
© Photography: Pablo Gómez-Ogando.
The timing of Houseago’s first exhibition in Spain gives the presentation an additional layer of significance. Banca March’s centenary theme, “A Future with History,” is reflected not only in the decision to open the garden but also in Houseago’s own approach to sculpture.
His practice consistently returns to the past without becoming nostalgic. Ancient figures, modernist experimentation, and contemporary cultural references coexist in the same sculptural vocabulary. His materials, too, carry a similar tension: traditional plaster, bronze, and aluminum meet industrial iron rods and natural hemp.
For an institution marking 100 years while considering its next chapter, that dialogue between inheritance and reinvention provides a fitting framework. The garden itself becomes part of the exhibition’s argument. It is a historic, private space temporarily opened to the city, transformed by works that ask viewers to slow down, move around them, and experience sculpture as something physical and changing.
Thomas Houseago has described sculpture as a way of translating thought and energy into inert material, seeking to give it “truth and form.” Across the Banca March garden, that transformation takes on a particularly atmospheric dimension. His monumental figures stand among living things, weather, water, and shifting light, making their own histories and surfaces feel less fixed.
For visitors, the exhibition offers not only a rare opportunity to see Houseago’s work in Spain, but also to enter a part of Madrid that is usually kept out of sight. Until October 30, sculpture and garden become inseparable—two spaces shaped by time, accumulation, transformation, and the possibility of looking toward the future without leaving history behind.
“Thomas Houseago. Sculptures. Banca March Garden” is on view at Banca March Gardens, Calle Castelló, 75, Madrid, through October 30, 2026. The garden is open Thursday from 7–11 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from noon–7 p.m.
