The Hidden Life of Isabel Coixet: The Filmmaker Presents Her ‘Collages’ to the Public

Isabel Coixet has been showcasing her artistic work—26 films—for over 30 years around the world. From Venice to Berlin, passing through Cannes and Barcelona. However, this Monday, she traded the cinema halls she frequents for a museum, the Thyssen in Madrid. Guillermo Solana, the museum’s artistic director, accompanied her to present, careful not to share any “spoiler,” the “secret work of Isabel Coixet.” It is not a film; rather, it is a series of collages that the creator of The Secret Life of Words or My Life Without You has been creating for over a decade, now presented to the public for the first time in an exhibition as part of PHotoEspaña 2025. “They are all [collages] very intriguing, and knowing who created them amplifies the intrigue: we want to know their relationship with their films,” summarizes Solana, the main attraction of the exhibition titled Learning in Disobedience, open until September 14.

This is a selection of 50 works (many more exist but are not displayed) that combine magazine clippings, “the bag from a photo booth or a semi-erotic novel from the ’70s,” explains the artist, presented in a variety of supports and techniques ranging from digital formats to canvas, foam board, paper, and tablex, most dated between 2021 and 2024. “I started without thinking about anything at all, just because I like to accumulate things. My spirit animal is the crow or the magpie, and I enjoy collecting absolutely absurd items,” the filmmaker justifies. Her obsession translates into a series of “elements from many eras, very disparate, coexisting in the same space and resignifying objects.” All accompanied by a literary component, a small phrase in different languages—sometimes so small that one must strain their eyes to read it—that often titles the work and gives it meaning.

It is almost impossible to find visual or aesthetic references in the collages that relate to scenes or scripts from Coixet’s films. Aside from “a couple of phrases” that she has used in two of her films, this is a distinct universe, a parallel creation, and as the title of the exhibition aptly explains, it embodies liberation and disobedience. “One of the good things about collage is that you can make mistakes. There is something very liberating about breaking that 25-millimeter objective. I have spent my entire life dedicated to a profession where making mistakes can be very costly, and with collage, it’s easy to toss everything in the trash and start over,” the filmmaker shares. Although she admits, “The baggage I carry behind the camera is probably the same I carry when I do other things.”

Historian Estrella de Diego, curator of the exhibition, delves into the idea: “This does not mean one is related to the other, because one is something very tactile and the other is not, but beyond the purely objective and technical, there is something in her way of seeing [Coixet’s]. She is able to take everyday things and completely displace them from their original context. And I believe that there, indeed, a coherence forms in her work.” It is also, of course, an exercise in memory, and a different way to enter the creator’s life. “We are all walking anachronisms, but we do what we can to disguise it. The person we were remains within us, and that coexistence between the six-year-old girl who hated crafts, the teenager who hated everything in general, and the older woman who hates everything still coexist,” Coixet shares.

The Thyssen dedicates the last of the rooms on the first floor, a small cornered space that fits—due to the small format of the works—about fifty collages. “One of the things I like most about this exhibition is the room. This place [the museum] is like a three-star Michelin restaurant. We already know the dishes. I am there after dessert, right? That which they give you and you no longer eat,” Coixet jokes. “I feel like an imposter, but I am someone who feels comfortable feeling like an imposter,” she concludes. Although she continues to primarily focus on cinema, currently immersed in the editing of her latest film, the collages she presents, along with many more left in her studio, are the result of those moments of disconnection—“being six hours on a train and not wanting to look at my phone,” she says—yet they remain another way to do what she does best: tell stories. And as de Diego explains in the exhibition’s information, in cinema or art, “the best-told stories are those constructed in fragments.”