Isabel Gómez Liebre. Allbino, of All the Terrors, the Terrible Whiteness EPICENTRO

Description

Isabel Gómez Liebre. Allbino, of All the Terrors, the Terrible Whiteness
EPICENTRO

“EPICENTRO” is a “appointed artist” programme conceived as a dynamic space for visibility and opportunity. “EPICENTRO” especially promotes midcareer artists, recognizing the quality of their work, their professional trajectory, and their contribution to the current art scene. Throughout the year, five artists are invited to intervene in a space with a unique, largeformat piece, designed specifically for the space. Each intervention, lasting up to six weeks, is completed with a public talk where each artist will share their process, career and vision, bringing the public closer to their practice in a direct and personal way.

Isabel Gómez Liebre
"Allbino, of All the Terrors, the Terrible Whiteness"
08.07 - 30.08.2026

The starting point of the series Albino, of All the Terrors, the Terrible Whiteness is a pictorial investigation into albinism understood as a territory of symbolic, political, and bodily tension. Far from treating this mutation as a mere documentary or biological motif, the project approaches those bodies that culture has historically relegated to the margins of representation: hyper-visible, ambiguous bodies that defy classification and are permeated by fascination or dread.

In this sense, the project dialogues with some of Michel Foucault’s ideas regarding bodies deemed anomalous, and the cultural mechanisms that bestow visibility, classification, and difference. Albinism as a threshold between purity and threat, between the animal and the spectral.

Of all the terrors, the terrible whiteness (Moby Dick, chapter 42, Herman Melville, 1851). This phrase introduces one of the project’s core intuitions: whiteness understood not as a symbol of purity but as an unsettling, excessive presence, almost impossible to take in. The white whale is the essence of the most absolute horror, linked precisely to that which overflows meaning and resists categorisation: the same ambiguity permeates Albino.

The piece presents an image of an albino elephant on a two-by-three-metre sheet of pale pink mirrored methacrylate. Rather than acting as a mere support, the medium functions as a vital part of the visual device. The reflective surface draws the viewer’s body into the work, compelling them to share the field of visibility with the depicted animal. The gaze ceases to be external or innocent: the observer too is on display. Furthermore, it introduces an organic dimension. This is no abstract or idealised whiteness, but one pierced by flesh, by physical vulnerability, and by the extreme sensitivity to light of a skin presented as an organ exposed to a non-neutral glare, one that turns violent, or sacrificial.

The piece thus proposes an experience of perceptual instability where image, reflection, and presence contaminate one another. Albino does not seek to represent a fixed identity, but rather to open a space of interrogation into what culture illuminates, casts aside, renders anomalous. Just there, where skin becomes depth.
Isabel Gómez Liebre