The Collection has unveiled the new exhibition “Five female photographers in the Banco Sabadell Art Collection”, which can be visited from 16 April to 16 May 2021, as part of the PhotoAlicante 2021 festival at the Banco Sabadell Auditorium in Alicante.

The five images by Hannah Collins, Cristina de Middel, Isabel Muñoz, Montserrat Soto and Mayte Vieta have as much to do with the idea as with the image: they are representations of the object or the subject that the photographers perceived and remained in their minds.

Hannah Collins’ vision of the city of Barcelona, a 2006 photograph from the True Stories series, is omniscient and meditative –a second of understanding of the city and its ups and downs.

Cristina de Middel, for her part, transports us to the beach of Ouidah, in Benin, a West African state where the divine presence of Èsû (translated as sphere) can be found. It is the representation of infinity according to the Yoruba religion.

In the case of Isabel Muñoz, the place is the body and, in this series (Mevlevi), the body in a whirling ceremony of Turkish dance and meditation, of spiritual descent towards truth and mystical ecstasy.

With the help of Jorge Luis Borges, Montserrat Soto takes us to Dante’s inferno; in this case, an inferno immersed in a nebula of greens and blues, without blacks, like the one that the blind Borges claims to be able to guess. Familiar and reminisced landscapes, repositories of all fears, a place of despair.

Finally, Mayte Vieta portrays herself marvelling at the absolute splendour of nature, in what seems to be a new version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, and the sublime experience of the landscape.

The city, nature, the body and hell… different places, real or imagined, in which the force of things comes into play: mythical and religious reality, vivid dreams, the supernatural and mysterious, knowledge and the desire for everything. Disparate images traversed, however, by an indecipherable sign that makes us feel part of the world and that we belong to it, even if only for a brief second.