MADRID.- Museo Reina Sofía director, Manuel Segade, presented on Tuesday morning, alongside Peruvian artist Andrea Canepa (Lima, 1980), the installation Fardo (Bundle), a piece which will adorn the Palacio de Cristal over the course of 2026 while restoration work is carried out on the building, one of the Museo’s galleries located in Madrid’s Retiro Park.
The canvas that stretches across this space references the bundles or collection of fabrics that covered the bodies of the dead in the pre-Columbian culture of Paracas, southern Peru, between 800 and 100 BC. Owing to the arid conditions of the land, the fabrics have remained in a good state of conservation, allowing studies on an often-overlooked material in historical research.
In designing the canvas, Canepa has created a mosaic of fabrics, some with motifs that could correspond to pre-Hispanic culture and other plain or single-coloured fabrics. The different parts of the canvas have been arranged around the Palacio de Cristal in such a way that the image evolves — the glass panels become stills that make sequences which cover and discover textiles, a cyclical narrative which gathers meaning as the visitor moves around the Palacio, turning it into a contemporary praxinoscope. As the artist explains: “On the façade the bundle is tied and, as visitors move around the building, layers are detached, before arriving at bandages that also remain concealed. As if in a loop, the bundle is re-created”.
Thus, Canepa’s work counterposes the Palacio de Cristal’s transparency, “Western Society’s obsession with seeing and knowing everything”, with a discovery shaped by walking around the building, in a process in which time is marked by the person strolling. To recreate the fabrics, Canepa has rendered them in oil paint and then photographed them. “Oil painting is constructed in the same way as the bundles; painted layers that are superimposed. Time also accumulates in layers”, she explained.
In the presentation to the piece, Manuel Segade stressed how Andrea Canepa’s work “is unique in that it sits at a crossroads between design and society, recovering the legacy of modernity to try to think how forms and symbols can be employed to connect people, weave communities and build imaginaries of different groups of people. And with these languages she has made pavilions, carried out interventions on architecture and created architectures in their own right, works which are halfway between furniture and utility design. That threshold between useful art and formal gesture was of particular interest to us”.
Canepa’s practice, a dialogue between art, sociology, history and anthropology, is underpinned by sustained research which often connects to her country’s past and the history of Latin America. This is such with Bundle, informed by the research she undertook in 2023 with the exhibition As we dwell in the fold at the MSU Broad Museum, Michigan, focused similarly on textile bundles from Paracas culture.
Andrea Canepa recently unveiled Entre lo profundo y lo distante (Between the Deep and the Distant) at IVAM and is currently a resident at Infinito Delicias. She has held solo shows at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque, Madrid (2025), the aforementioned MSU Broad Museum, Michigan (2023), the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo MEIAC, Badajoz (2023), and de Appel, Amsterdam (2022). Her work has also been exhibited at the Museo de Artes Visuales MAVI UC, Santiago de Chile, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Kunstverein Springhornhof, Neuenkirchen, and Fundación Carlos de Amberes.
The canvas has been made using HP Latex, large-format HP printing technology. This innovative technology ensures not only high-quality printing but is also environmentally friendly. Its water-based inks remove odours and dangerous air pollutants, while the durability and resistance of HP Latex printing guarantees long-lasting, vibrant and sharp colours, even in adverse conditions.
Bundle is the second artistic intervention to cover the Palacio de Cristal during restoration work to the building, following on from Miguel Ángel Tornero’s Gran Friso (Big Frieze), on view across 2025.
