Starting this Friday, the Espais d’Art Urbà network in Benidorm will present a new group exhibition funded by the Department of Historical and Cultural Heritage. The show will unfold across several city neighborhoods housing these art spaces, with the title Looking is not as easy as it seems. It brings together the works of three renowned artists and graphic designers spanning collage art and related disciplines.
The participating creators are Miriam Martínez Abellán, Susana Blasco, and Erre Gálvez, whose plates form the core of the exhibition. The official opening is scheduled for Friday, October 6, at 11 a.m., on Paseo de Poniente near the Jaime I intersection. Ana Pellicer, the councilor responsible for Historical and Cultural Heritage, emphasizes that the project reinforces the city’s commitment to accessible culture. It aims to turn Benidorm into an open-air museum, inviting residents and visitors to engage with art in everyday spaces. The councilor notes that the exhibition showcases a diverse range of artistic proposals drawn from the personal worlds of three distinct artists, created with care and imagination. The piece titled Many possibilities like collage hints at the expansive potential of this medium.
Outdoor art turns Benidorm into a museum
L’Espai d’Art Urbà de Ponent will host the works of Miriam Martínez Abellán, featuring a collage-based synthesis of 16 images titled Experiencing the ineffable. The artist invites viewers to move beyond concrete surroundings into spaces where daily contexts blur under the influence of dreams and metaphors. Martínez Abellán’s pieces blend cut-ups with casual juxtapositions of fragmented images, textures, and colors, mixing nostalgia and contemporary quirks to evoke ideas that elude simple description. The works convey pure visual poetry and are bathed in a surreal, almost magical atmosphere with a social commentary woven in.
Espais d’Art Urbà in Carrasco, Pont, and Hispanitat will display 18 paintings by Susana Blasco, including works titled Fugaces, Era, and Radiantes. These geometric collages explore memory, forgetting, and women through fragmentation, repetition, order, and a restrained palette centered on white and ocher. The artist reuses found photographs—often drawn from family albums or corporate archives—to construct the series. The complete set Fugaces (2021) comprises ten portraits created from found images of emerging models from the 1960s, complemented by three collages from Era (2022). For this event, a selection of Quico’s photographs from the Benidorm archive has been incorporated to create Radiantes, a series of five analogue collages in which the sun serves as a unifying symbol across the works.
This is the new outdoor urban art space in Benidorm
At Espais d’Art Urbà del Campo and Els Tolls, visitors will encounter 19 paintings created in collaboration with Alicante artist Erre Gálvez. The show guides viewers through a singular universe where photography and paper converge. The pieces are built from found materials or analog photographs shot by the artist himself, arranged like scenes in a play. Each item, a fragment of history, opens a tactile door to nostalgia and memories.
All works will remain on display for four months, concluding on January 31 of next year. The councilor for Historical and Cultural Heritage invites residents and tourists to explore the different exhibition spaces and enjoy this broad, collective display, confident that the public will respond with enthusiasm. (Cited from the City of Benidorm cultural department)