Cathartes

Madrid, Spain

Contemporary audiovisual installation and sculpture, with conceptual, symbolic, and postcolonial layers.

Daniel Jacoby, 'Gallinazo', 2026 (fotogram)

Image credit

Daniel Jacoby, 'Gallinazo', 2026 (fotogram) © Maisterra

Meet the artist

The Movement

Contemporary Art, Video Art Movement

ArtLovers Tip

Don’t treat the gallinazo as a symbol of death only. Try to see it as a purifier — a creature that transforms what others reject. The most powerful question in the exhibition is not “What is this bird?” but “Who decides what belongs, what is excluded, and what gets named?”

Exhibition Highlights - What you’ll see

The exhibition combines one audiovisual piece, Gallinazo, with five bronze sculptures, using the figure of the black vulture — Coragyps atratus — to explore memory, identity, classification, exclusion, and the violence of naming.

Cathartes unfolds around a private club, childhood memories, social belonging, exclusion, and the silent presence of a gallinazo watching from above.

The video moves between different moments in the narrator’s life: childhood, the return after ten years in Europe, family life, and an 18th-century episode in which a European naturalist arrives sick on the Peruvian coast. These layers of time overlap, connected by the vulture’s gaze.

You’re watching:

  • A private club as a symbolic machine of continuity and belonging
  • A vulture that becomes a figure of the limit: inside/outside, life/death, wild/civilized
  • The violence of classification: how naming something can reduce, fix, and stigmatize it
  • Five bronze vultures, distorted and elevated, as if watching us from a distance
  • A gallery space covered in blue raffia, turning the white cube into an artificial skin

The exhibition feels strange, layered, and quietly disturbing — like a memory that refuses to stay clean.

Worth the trip

If you like contemporary art that works through symbols, narrative, and discomfort.

Because Cathartes is not really “about” a vulture.

It is about what societies refuse to see — death, decay, exclusion, wildness, impurity — and how language can create the illusion that those things do not exist.

How to experience it

Watch the video as a layered memory, not a linear story

Pay attention to who is looking: the narrator, the bird, the naturalist, you

Move around the bronze sculptures slowly — their forms resist immediate recognition

Notice the blue raffia: the space itself becomes part of the fiction

Let the discomfort stay with you; this exhibition is built around what cannot be easily absorbed or named

Madrid, Spain

Discover the destination

Experience art in Madrid

Spain

Art in Madrid — Museums, exhibitions & artworks worth traveling for. From Velázquez to today’s global contemporary scene, Madrid turns a city break into an art journey.

Explore Madrid

Because you are an artlover,

Join our community of art enthusiasts and discover exhibitions, artists, and masterpieces tailored to your tastes. Get personalized recommendations and never miss a must-see show again.