Marta Ibarrondo’s practice is a meditation on the intersections of language, memory, and material form. Born in Bilbao, Spain, and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, she spent three decades in New York City working across advertising, film, illustration, and fine art before focusing on a body of work that unites conceptual inquiry with tactile, visual storytelling.

Her ongoing “visual library” reimagines books and cultural texts as layered, material archives. Kerouac’s On the Road unfolds across vintage maps alive with freedom and nostalgia; Orwell’s Animal Farm is inscribed onto butcher paper and knives, exposing the brutality beneath political power; while The Bible is dissected to reveal how misogyny has endured through centuries of interpretation and law. Each piece uncovers the tensions between private imagination and collective memory, between the written word and the material world it inhabits.

Ibarrondo’s practice builds a living archive where text transforms into image, memory hardens into matter, and forgotten words rise again; to dazzle, to challenge, and to persist.