LEÓN.- MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León is presenting its summer exhibition season, running July 12–October 19, 2025.

Amplitude / Meadow is the title of the first exhibition in Spain by the Dutch duo DRIFT [Lonneke Gordijn (1980) and Ralph Nauta (1978)], internationally acclaimed for their installations, sculptures and performances that interweave technology, nature, and humanity. Alongside this exhibition, Secundino Hernández (Madrid, 1975)—one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Spanish painting—presents Total Station, a faithful reflection of the artist’s key concerns over the past decade, with a particular focus on abstraction. Both exhibitions will be on view until October 19.

DRIFT: Amplitude / Meadow

Founded in Amsterdam in 2007 by artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, DRIFT is now composed of a multidisciplinary team of 45 designers, engineers, artists and scientists. In their practice, the artists use technology to reveal the hidden properties and behaviours of the natural world, aiming to learn from Earth’s underlying mechanisms and to restore our connection with it. Their work lays bare the parallels between man-made and natural structures through a combination of deconstructive, interactive and innovative processes.

Their MUSAC exhibition features two of their most acclaimed installations: Amplitude and Meadow. Amplitude (2017) is inspired by the boundless energy observed in nature—particularly the endless rhythm of ocean waves—and by the sense of connection it evokes in viewers. In this piece, a choreography of suspended elements—swaying glass tubes that catch and reflect the light—creates a hypnotic atmosphere that conveys calm, wonder, and a sense of unity with the natural world.

Meadow (2017) is a kinetic sculpture composed of mechanical flowers that open and close in a poetic choreography triggered by the presence of viewers. Site-specific and made to match the colours of the local flora, the installation has been shown in various institutions globally, each time distinctly mesmerizing.

With this exhibition, DRIFT presents a hopeful vision of the future in which technology and nature are not opposing forces, but complementary ones.

Secundino Hernández: Total Season

The exhibition Total Season, curated by MUSAC director Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, brings together over 35 works, including ten previously unseen pieces, offering a faithful representation of the Secundino Hernández’s core concerns over the last decade, with a particular focus on abstraction.

Rather than drawing on immediate historical references, Hernández chooses to explore the phenomenon of painting in solitude, deliberately shedding historical baggage in order to create a personal space—a kind of inner dialogue. In his practice, the erosion of surface and pigment, repetition and seriality, composition, accumulation and the fragmentation of cut canvas all play a central role.

The exhibition’s title, inspired by the book La estación total by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, relates to the artist’s interest in capturing the passage of time through the changing of the seasons. In this regard, the conceptual starting point of the exhibition is marked by the polyptych Cuatro estaciones. Entre verano y otoño [Four Seasons. Between Summer and Fall] (2017), an approach to the contemporary landscape being shown in Spain for the first time.

Although painting constitutes the majority of works selected, the exhibition also includes a set of screenprints from 2020, and a series of aluminum reliefs in which the artist simulates an assemblage practice—with illusionism as the dominant feature. These pieces offer a window onto the broad range of techniques, materials, and registers through which Hernández continues to expand his visual language. A tension between the emotional and the formal, the conceptual and the organic, runs through both his production and his working process.