Gallery lures collectors to Spain’s abandoned region with large-scale sculpture trail

The craggy landscape of Matarraña, in eastern Spain, might seem an unlikely setting for the art trade. More than two hours away from Barcelona by car and one hour from the nearest beach, it is located in “emptied Spain”, a region that was left barren by a massive rural exodus in the 20th century and which has remained the country’s least populated region since.

It was precisely this remoteness that drew in the gallerists Eva Albarrán and Christian Bourdais, the founders of the Albarrán Bourdais gallery in Madrid. In 2010, they launched Solo Houses, an open-ended project in Matarraña that began with a series of avant-garde architect homes and has since evolved into a retreat for collectors and art enthusiasts, complete with large-scale site-specific installations, a sculpture trail and plans for a hotel.

Slow-growing collection

The sculpture trail will be inaugurated on 15 June and winds through 5km of vineyards and hills surrounding the Solo Houses—a slow-growing collection of experimental residences. It features 20 large-scale installations, mostly by artists from the gallery’s international roster, including Mona Hatoum, José Dávila and Christian Boltanski. In total, Solo Houses spreads across 200 hectares, surrounded by clusters of medieval towns with just a few hundred residents.

The trail is the new piece of the puzzle that forms the gallery’s “universe”, Bourdais and Albarrán say. Other pieces include an exhibition space in Madrid and a converted manor house gallery in Menorca. In Matarraña, the pair also run a winery with limited-edition bottles bearing artist-designed labels. In May they received a permit to build a hotel on the same grounds, which is set to open by 2028 and will be designed by the Chilean architect Smiljan Radic. “There is quite a traditional aspect in galleries today, with four white walls and exhibitions every two, three months,” Bourdais says. “We try to redefine that.”

Dialogue between art and nature

For Albarrán and Bourdais, time is a luxury collectors can rarely afford. “Today, real collectors don’t want to be exposed to an accumulation of art; they want to get to know the gallerists, the artists,” Bourdais says. To fulfil that demand, the couple regularly invites collectors to Matarraña to explore the art at their own pace and immerse themselves in nature. In spite of their size, the installations are invisible for most of the trail, blending in with the forest and vineyards. The Office Solo House, designed by the Belgian studio Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen, disappears in the landscape thanks to its moveable walls. This is a conscious choice. As Albarrán explains, the art is in dialogue with nature but ultimately, “nature wins”.

The Mexican artist Jose Davila was struck by the ambition and uniqueness of the project. “They have the healthy habit of having blind faith in their collaborators,” he tells The Art Newspaper. Davila stayed in Matarraña last September to scout with Bourdais the ideal location for his bespoke works. Local construction companies and artisans were involved in the production of his pieces, as well as those of other artists and the houses. The only smith of Cretas, a nearby town of fewer than 300 inhabitants, worked on both Davila’sand Hatoum’s pieces. “It’s very attractive for an artist to find models of galleries beyond four white walls,” Davila says.

Describing their ideal collector, Albarrán and Bourdais say a certain sensitivity is required to imagine the monumental in a domestic space, “and to find a place for the artwork as magical as the current one”, Bourdais adds. Transforming one of Spain’s most remote regions into a destination for collectors and cultural pilgrims remains a gamble, but Albarrán and Bourdais say that the project has proven financially viable. Temporary installations have been successfully sold—Last Day Bed by Mathieu Mercier found a buyer last year—and the Solo Houses generate a steady income as filming locations, holiday rentals and event venues.