Palma show brings Rafa Forteza’s 90s works back
Works that have remained in Rafa Forteza’s studio since the 1990s are returning to view in Palma, Mallorca. The Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de las Baleares (Coaib) opens Cráneo on Wednesday, bringing together sculptures, drawings and works on paper from the early 1980s to the present day. Some of the pieces have not been shown outside the artist’s studio for decades.
Curated by Esmeralda Gómez, the exhibition does not follow Forteza’s career in date order. Instead, it places work from widely separated periods side by side, allowing past gestures, forms and ideas to be seen anew from the present.
Among the returning 1990s pieces are the sculptures known as Las Cruces. They were not made for any particular exhibition and combine masses and found materials with small items including resin fragments, brushes, buttons and coloured pencils.
Cráneo — Spanish for “skull” — continues a line of work Forteza and Gómez showed at Coaib in January 2026 with Cámara de ecos. The new display uses the skull as an image of a hollow space where time passes and ideas form, gather and connect before becoming visible. Its selection and installation are shaped by three actions: turning, repeating and remaining.
Source: Europa Press / Mallorca.com