The Gustavo de Maeztu Museum presents the exhibition ‘José Ignacio Agorreta. Opening the Door’

The Gustavo de Maeztu Museum brings together 35 works by the Navarran artist in an exhibition that will run from 9 October to 27 December 2026

The Gustavo de Maeztu Museum presents ‘José Ignacio Agorreta. Opening the Door’, an exhibition bringing together 35 works created between 2019 and 2026, which will be open to the public from 9 October to 27 December 2026.
The exhibition marks José Ignacio Agorreta’s return to a museum with which he has a long-standing relationship and whose collection includes works by the artist. Agorreta has previously exhibited his work at the Gustavo de Maeztu Museum and now returns with a selection of his most recent works, establishing a dialogue between his current painting and the career of an artist who is fundamental to understanding some of the key trends in contemporary Navarran painting.
A career linked to painting and memory
Born in Pamplona in 1963, José Ignacio Agorreta began exhibiting his work in the early 1990s. Self-taught, he won first prize in the Young Navarrese Artists’ Painting Competition in 1991 and received a creative grant from the Government of Navarre in 1993. In those early years, he was also one of the founders of the +4 Group, alongside Koldo Sebastián, Félix Ortega and Juan Belzunegui – a collective that championed the continued relevance of painting at a time when new artistic languages and media dominated much of the art scene.

Since then, Agorreta has built up an extensive exhibition record, with over thirty solo exhibitions and numerous appearances in group shows. His work is held in public collections such as those of the Museum of Navarre, Pamplona City Council, the Public University of Navarre, the Caja Navarra Foundation, the Parliament of Navarre and the Gustavo de Maeztu Museum, amongst others.
Over the decades, his painting has maintained a constant focus on that which remains when everything else disappears: spaces, architecture, objects and small traces of everyday life. The city, its outskirts and those places that have fallen into disuse become settings where reality meets memory and the imagination.

This focus on the seemingly insignificant remains a feature of his recent work. In 2025, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Ormolú Gallery, the artist himself explained how certain abandoned objects – a door handle, a coat hanger, a plug socket or a fridge – can trigger memories and become repositories of the lives that were once linked to them. For Agorreta, painting arises from an emotional experience and seeks to generate an emotional experience in the viewer as well.
Opening the Door
The title of the exhibition, ‘Opening the Door’, suggests precisely a gesture of entry. Opening a door means entering a space we do not yet know, but also looking towards what lies on the other side and which, in some way, already feels familiar to us.
In Agorreta’s paintings, this door can be understood as a threshold between the present and the past, between what we see and what we imagine, between the concrete reality of a space and the stories we are able to project onto it.
The exhibition brings together works created at various times over recent years and in different formats. The collection combines oil on canvas and oil on panel, ranging from large-format pieces to a large group of small paintings measuring 27 × 25 centimetres.

All the works are listed under the same title: ‘Untitled’. This decision removes any direct narrative reference and leaves the viewer face to face with the image, allowing their own gaze to complete what the painting suggests.
Among the selected works are pieces created between 2019 and 2026, offering an insight into different stages of Agorreta’s recent output. Alongside the small-format works on panel are larger canvases.
Rather than offering a definitive interpretation, ‘Abrir la puerta’ invites us to look. To pause before each work and let our own associations, memories or sensations emerge. Because, in Agorreta’s painting, what we see does not necessarily end at the surface of the canvas: it can become the starting point for another place, another time or even another memory.
An invitation to look slowly
In a context characterised by the speed of images and an increasingly immediate relationship with the visual, the exhibition offers a different experience: looking slowly.
Agorreta works from this pause. His paintings do not merely seek to reproduce what the artist has encountered before his eyes, but to recapture the emotion that that place, that object or that fragment of reality evoked in him. As the artist himself recently pointed out, when he paints he embarks on an ‘emotional journey’ and hopes that those who view his work may also undertake their own.
‘José Ignacio Agorreta. Opening the Door’ thus offers a journey through a body of work in which time, memory and the gaze take centre stage. An exhibition that opens a door into the artist’s universe, but which also leaves open another possibility: that each visitor may find, on the other side, their own memories.

The exhibition can be visited free of charge at the Gustavo de Maeztu Museum during its opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, from 9.30 am to 1.30 pm, and on Sundays and public holidays, from 11.00 am to 2.00 pm. The museum is closed on Mondays.