Personal Picks: Júlia Alzueta

Personal Picks is a new format where someone from our team selects four artworks that resonate with them on a personal level. From intimate favorites to unexpected discoveries, each selection offers an individual, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the gallery’s evolving universe—one artwork at a time.

First up: Júlia Alzueta, our Gallery Director at Alzueta Gallery. With a sharp eye and deep connection to the artists we work with, Júlia shares a personal selection shaped by intuition, emotion, and years of close collaboration.

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I firmly believe that personal stories —our experiences, connections, and shared time— shape and play an essential role in how we relate to the works and the artists that move us. With this selection, I’ve aimed to subtly weave a fragment of my own story within the gallery. To place art on an emotional map that speaks of beginnings, of the present, of generational affinities, using time as my compass.

My first two choices are closely tied to time: seen both as a beginning and as the present. The first is by Manolo Ballesteros, the artist who has been with the gallery the longest, and someone I’ve also known personally for many years.

The work I’ve selected is one of his pieces on paper, in which his entire practice and research seem to be suspended inside a methacrylate box: the form, the volume, the color. There’s something intimate and contained in it, a geometry closed in on itself where everything has already been said, with an economy of gesture that only amplifies its intensity.

The second piece is by Wolfgang Voegele, the most recent artist to join the gallery’s program, and someone whose work I had followed closely, with care and admiration, for many years. We recently shared a deep conversation about the meaning of abstraction and the depth that inhabits his practice. That exchange brought me even closer to his world. The work I’ve chosen feels exquisite in its simplicity: without flourish, with great sobriety, it manages to both resolve and reveal the very questions that move him as an artist.

The other two works speak to a different kind of origin; not a beginning in the strictest sense, but rather a point of synchronicity in time. They are works by two artists born the same year as me: Nuria Maria and Andrea Torres Balaguer.

Nuria Maria’s piece, titled “Granite Spring Grey”, places time —understood here as weather— at the core of its essence. In her work, we’ve seen how the elements have gradually become more abstract, aiming to capture the atmosphere of a fleeting moment, the light of a season. I believe this large-scale painting achieves that with exquisite delicacy.

Finally, I’ve chosen “La crisàlide” by Andrea Torres Balaguer, the central work in her series “Metamorfosis”. Here, the artist explores transformation as a point of departure. To me, it’s a singular work in her practice. By learning the language and properties of ink and merging it with analog photography, Andrea continues to walk the path of contemporary surrealism, focusing on the relationship between physical transformation (through a new material) and psychic transformation (new states of mind, new directions of thought).

This selection forms a personal constellation: works that intersect with different moments in my journey within the gallery, and that, in some quiet way, continue to speak to one another — and to me — across time.
Júlia Alzueta