22 August — 6 September 2026
Location: Sea Hall · Carrer Verge del Carme, 34, Cala Figuera (Santanyí), Illes Balears, Spain
Opening reception: Saturday 22 August, 19:00
Viewing: the exhibition is visible from the street at any hour; personal viewings by appointment.
Sea Hall is pleased to present Anar a pescar a Cala Figuera, a solo exhibition by the Mallorcan artist Alex Amengual, curated by Ana Serra. It is Amengual’s first exhibition at the gallery and the first public showing of this new body of work, in which the fishing net — the meeting point between people and the sea — becomes both the tool and the image of the painting.
The exhibition presents four works selected from a larger series: framed paintings on paper (62 × 87 cm), made in 2026 and shown here for the first time. Each begins as a sea: acrylic diluted in seawater drawn from the port of Cala Figuera is thrown and washed across the paper the way the sea breaks against the rocks of the cala. Working nets belonging to the port’s fishermen are then dragged and pressed through the wet paint, and finally a photographed net, transposed onto a silkscreen, is printed over the finished surface — the man-made interacting with the natural. The same tool thus passes three times through each painting: the fisherman’s instrument, the painter’s, and at last the image itself. Though made with the means of printmaking, these works are not an edition — each is a unique painting, a single cast, a single catch.
The title records how the exhibition began: the artist withdrew to Cala Figuera for three days to fish, not for the sea’s yield but for the work it might give back.
Behind the exhibition lies a larger thought that now connects two bodies of work. In Corpus Terra (2025), currently touring the Balearic Islands with the group exhibition De Meninas Va, Amengual ground the agricultural earth of Sa Pobla, his home town, into a pigment bound with a drop of his own blood, and printed from it the imprint of his own body — a meditation on the soil that both feeds us and receives our dead. The present exhibition turns the same thought toward the water: people of the sea draw their food from the same water into which they surrender their dead. Sustenance and loss share one element, and it is with that element, literally and materially, that Amengual paints. Land beneath, sea around — together the two bodies of work describe island life from an islander’s point of view, an inquiry the artist expects to widen far beyond Mallorca.
About the artist
Alex Amengual (Mallorca, 1970) is a visual artist living and working between Sa Pobla and London. His work rests on a conviction carried through four decades behind the camera: that surface beauty is the least of what an image can hold, and that what endures in a work is its emotional charge. Photography remains in his practice not as an end but as an instrument — the camera transposes elements of the natural world (the body, the earth, a fishing net) onto the silkscreen, where they re-enter the work by hand.
His subject is the bond between people and place, addressed through the physical matter of the place itself. In Corpus Terra (2025), he ground the agricultural earth of Sa Pobla — the town where he lives, where his son was born and his father died — into a pigment bound with a drop of his own blood, printing from it the imprint of his own body: a meditation on presence, permanence and the soil that both feeds us and receives us. A new body of work now moves him from land to coast and the sea: paintings made with acrylic diluted in seawater and worked with fishermen’s nets, over which a photographed net is screen-printed, the man-made interacting with the natural. Together the two bodies of work describe island life from an islander’s point of view — a union of the land beneath and the sea around — an inquiry that continues to widen. The son of an artist, Amengual regards this attention to what remains, of a place, of a person, of a gesture, as an inheritance.
Amengual has exhibited in Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Corpus Terra was first shown at Can Corró, Sa Pobla (2025), and is currently touring with the group exhibition De Meninas Va, which in 2026 has travelled to Casa de Cultura (Felanitx), Centre d’Art Sa Quartera (Inca), Sant Crist (S’Arracó) and Sala de Plens, Ajuntament d’Andratx, and is now showing at Sala del Roser, Ciutadella, Menorca. The group show Reinterpretant Sant Antoni, also ongoing, has been seen at Can Soler (Sa Pobla) and Ca na Polida (Campanet). Earlier exhibitions include Centro Cultural Sa Nostra, Palma (2002), Projectile Arts, New York (2003), and galleries in Manchester and Scotland. His work is held in private collections nationally and internationally.
Contact details / press inquiries
Exhibition: Alex Amengual: Anar a pescar a Cala Figuera
Duration: 22 August — 6 September 2026
Location: Sea Hall, Carrer Verge del Carme, 34, Cala Figuera (Santanyí), Illes Balears, Spain
Opening reception: Saturday 22 August 2026, 19:00
Viewing: visible from the street at any hour; personal viewings by appointment
Contact: Ana Serra (Sea Hall) — seahallstudio@gmail.com — +34 644 57 37 99
Artist: www.amengual.com
All images, including installation views and individual artworks, are available on request at seahallstudio@gmail.com.