Diego Delas

Diego Delas (b. 1983, Aranda de Duero, Spain) lives and works in Málaga. His practice explores the house as both a physical structure and a vessel of personal, familial, and collective memory. Drawing on his upbringing in Spain’s rural Castile region, Delas constructs images and installations that evoke vernacular architecture, domestic rituals, and the layered passage of time. His work is rooted in processes of reconstruction, repetition, and reinterpretation, engaging with forms of pre-modern culture and ways of life that are gradually disappearing. His paintings, textiles, and installations often incorporate reclaimed fabrics, construction materials, handmade elements, and structural fragments. These works function as fragments of a larger dwelling, bringing together architectural motifs, maps, diagrams, and talismanic forms. Their compositions invite a process of reading, in which individual elements and the work as a whole can be deciphered as part of a personal and collective symbolic language. Drawing on domestic practices and forms of manual labour, Delas connects making and remembering, while his use of amulets and protective symbols evokes older systems of magical and ritual knowledge. Across his practice, Delas considers the relationship between preservation and disappearance, and between material traces and the memories they contain. His works approach vernacular architecture not as a static monument but as a form shaped by lived experience, adaptation, labour, and successive generations. In this sense, the house becomes a familiar body populated by memories and amulets, occupying a space between architecture, archaeology, storytelling, and material culture. Delas studied Architecture and Fine Art at the Universidad Europea de Madrid before moving to London, where he completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art between 2013 and 2015. From 2016 to 2019, he completed a DPhil in Art Practice at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. His studies and research have been supported by the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, the Lucy Halford Bursary and other Royal College of Art awards, as well as the Fundación Montemadrid Generación Award and, more recently, the Fundación Botín International Visual Arts Grant. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including at CAB Burgos, CentroCentro Madrid, Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, CA2M Madrid, MUSAC León, and the Art Sonje Center in Seoul. In 2025, his work was included in *Clear, Lucid, and Awake*, curated by Chus Martínez, at the Art Sonje Center, as well as *Terrafilia* at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. His work is held in collections including TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, MUSAC, Fundación Montemadrid, Colección DKV, Colección Kells, and the Cervezas Alhambra Collection.