Isabel Coixet is one of the most prolific and awarded Spanish filmmakers, with 14 feature films, seven documentaries, and ten Goya Awards, more than any other female director in the history of Spanish cinema. In 2020, she received the National Cinematography Award, and in 2015 she was honored with the ‘Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres’ Medal by the French Ministry of Culture.
For years, Coixet has been exploring another narrative language: collage.
A practice that, like her films, invites the viewer to reconstruct meaning from fragments, to inhabit the unfinished and the ambiguous. Her works, made with clippings, old photographs, letters, and found objects, recall classic Hollywood storyboards, but also the avant-garde tradition of Hanna Höch or Kurt Schwitters. These are pieces born from diversion and drift, offering a subtle disobedience: stepping out of the comfort zone and relearning how to look.
In 2025, Coixet presented a selection of these works at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, as part of the exhibition Learning in Disobedience, curated by Estrella de Diego. The show features around fifty collages made between 2021 and 2024, blending found objects, ephemeral materials, painterly strokes, and an intimate, deeply personal visual narrative.
For the first time, Max Estrella is exhibiting her Italian Collages, a series conceived during the filming of her latest feature in Rome. In these, Coixet transforms both her own images and those of others into tactile, almost three-dimensional surfaces where time folds in on itself and collective memory intertwines with individual identity. As in her films, it’s not enough to simply look: one must reassemble, between the lines and the silences, what is not entirely said.