BIO
Erola Arcalís (b. 1986 Menorca; lives and works in London, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses photography, installation, and writing. Her work investigates how individual and collective memories are shaped through emotional, ecological, and historical landscapes. Drawing from literature, mythology, psychology, and philosophy, Arcalís considers the intersections between these fields fundamental to imagining new forms of caretaking and world-making.
Interweaving images of abstract landscapes, sculptural still lifes, automatic, and poetic writing, Arcalís reassesses historical memory and the archive beyond a linear temporal narrative and generates actualised interpretations of symbolic meanings. She employs a 5x4 analogue camera to produce large-scale silver gelatin handprints, which she uses as canvases for further intervention.
Most recently Arcalís has been exploring the boundaries of the photographic image by integrating painting and writing on the print’s surface. The addition of new processes into the work has been a progression of her approach to image-making - which conceives the image as a vessel of both poetic and conceptual agency; which materiality and meaning can be transformed by means of gesture and movement.
Erola Arcalís’ work has been shown at the OAS Art Museum of the Americas (Washington DC), the Spanish contemporary art institutions Casal Solleric (Mallorca) and Centro Cultural Galileo (Madrid). She has also exhibited with Copperfield Gallery, Peckham24 (London) and Hauser & Wirth Menorca. As part of her commitment to critical engagement and making art accessible to young people, Arcalís often incorporates experimental, practice-based workshops into her public exhibitions.
CV
MA Photography, Royal College of Art (2017)
selected exhibitions
Nuestros Ancestros
OAS Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC
2024
After the Mediterranean
Hauser & Wirth Menorca
2023
Flotsam (and other utopias)
Casal Solleric, Majorca
2023
What if, If Only
Studio Weil, Majorca
2023
Constellations
Studio Weil, Majorca
2022
(This) Precious Stone Set in the Silver Sea
Copperfiled, London
2020
Rehearsing the Real
Peckham24, London
2020
Futures
Unseen, Amsterdam
2019
Descubrimientos
PhotoEspaña, Madrid
2019
Essential Landscapes
JustMad, Lisbon
2019residencies and awards
Artist Residency Hauser & Wirth Menorca
February - March 2023
Arist Residency LaValle
organized by l’Aquila Reale Arte e Natura
with the support of Homesession and Institut Ramon Llull
Licenza, Italy, September - November 2022
Shortlisted for Barbara Weil Award
Majorca, September 2023 and July 2022
Shortlisted for Descubrimientos, PhotoEspaña
Madrid, June 2019
Selected artist of FUTURES 2020
Amsterdam, 2019-20
workshops and public acivities
Workshop ‘Cyanotypes & the Family Archive’
for the local Art School students
Hauser & Wirth Menorca, 2023
Workshop ‘Creative Practice and the family archive’ open to the general public
Casal Solleric in Collaboration with Casa Planas, 2023
Public talk ‘Souvenirs, Mediterraneities & Memory in the Making’
INSPAI, Girona, Spain
6th November 2025 (upcoming)
(SEE MORE)
selected press
‘Menorca-born and London-based artist Erola Arcalís presents works that are two-dimensional,successfully exploring the sensation of time against the sensibilities of the landscape and enabling and offering the present and future a platform on which to apply itself. Shipwreck Studies (2017–22) comprises photographic works that are deliciously difficult to read as they sink into their own swell of water. Intentionally including nothing of the horizon, they appear as abstracted images that are timeless, as is the condition of the water. Conceived of by an artist drawing on her interests in narrative and the nature of memory as a motioned experience, they offer her audience these tonal representations of reality, as recorded by the artist’s choice of images.’
Dry Water: After the Mediterranean at Hauser & Wirth, Canvas Art Review, by Rajesh Punj
https://canvasonline.com/dry-water-after-the-mediterranean-at-hauser-wirth/
2023
All images © Erola Arcalís 2025 except installation shots or indicated otherwise