Project Epicentro – Madrid 2026

08/07/2026 – 30/08/2026 | Project EPICENTRO Madrid City

Albino: Of All Terrors, the Terrible Whiteness

© Isabel Gómez Liebre, VEGAP, 2026

EPICENTRO is a guest artist programme conceived as a dynamic platform for visibility and opportunity. It is dedicated to supporting mid-career artists, recognising the quality of their work, their professional trajectory, and their contribution to the contemporary art scene.

Albino, Of All Terrors, the Terrible Whiteness is a painting series that investigates albinism as a site of symbolic, political, and corporeal tension. Rather than approaching this genetic condition from a documentary or biological perspective, the project focuses on bodies that have historically been relegated to the margins of representation: hypervisible, ambiguous bodies that resist classification and have long been shaped by fascination and fear.

The title refers to the chapter The Whiteness of the Whale (Chapter 42) in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), and in particular to the phrase “Of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”, from which emerges one of the project’s central ideas: whiteness not as a symbol of purity, but as an unsettling, excessive presence that resists interpretation. Melville’s white whale embodies a form of absolute terror rooted precisely in that which exceeds meaning and escapes categorisation. That same ambiguity permeates Albino.

Rather than representing a fixed identity, the work opens a space for questioning what culture chooses to illuminate, exclude, or define as anomalous. It is a place where skin ceases to be surface and becomes depth.

Technical Information

Albino: Of All Terrors, the Terrible Whiteness
Oil on mirrored acrylic.
400 × 440 cm.
Part of the ongoing series initiated in 2024.
Site-specific intervention created for the wall of the operations courtyard.