Artists

Susana Guerrero

Press release

532 Gallery Basel presents Susana Guerrero The Female's Open Body | El cuerpo abierto de la hembra Opening 21 April 2026 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel Hammerstrasse 121, Basel 4057, Switzerland "The female body unfolds and reveals itself in the unseen realm." With this sentence Susana Guerrero opens her new body of work. Following her landmark Chelsea solos Anatomía del mito / Anatomy of a Myth (2016) and La madre consumida / Mother Consumed (2021) at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in New York, the Spanish artist returns with her first major Basel exhibition. This exhibition addresses the female body as a territory of transformation, loss, and symbolic rearrangement. Starting from severed figures—Santa Catalina de Alejandría, Medusa, La Mare dels Peixos—the body operates from its own wound, reshaping itself and the energy flowing through it. Like an alchemical still (alembic), the female body distills its essence, separating the subtle from the dense. Reconstruction happens as an internal, silent, ongoing process: the severed body awakens, the cut concentrates the force and causes it to circulate, the body becomes pregnant, and Medusa's head turns into an ouroboros. At the heart of the show stands the monumental installation Santa Catalina de Alejandría decapitada / Saint Catherine of Alexandria Severed (2021), in dialogue with the new Cabeza de Medusa transformada en Ouroboros / Medusa's Head Transformed into an Ouroboros (2024). The sculptural gesture Ostentatio Mammarum (2024) functions as a powerful sign of maternal authority: "a display of the breast as a symbol of owed debt, generative power, and divine motherhood." Large-scale fiber and jacquard works Disección de la alquimia digestiva / Dissection of Digestive Alchemy and Alquimia digestiva, desollada / Digestive Alchemy, Skinned (both 2024) complete the ritual, exorcising and preserving the memory of ancient wisdom in constant flux. Guerrero's practice—rooted in Spanish ritual, Greek and Mexican mythologies, and material alchemy—continues her signature transformation of physical pain into purification. From Chelsea to Basel, from myth to open body: this is the next chapter.