New exhibition in Torre del Mar explores the art of calligraphy
Local artist Gema Martínez presents her work, Evocâre, at the eastern Costa del Sol town's tourist information office until Sunday 3 May
Jennie Rhodes
Monday, 20 April 2026, 12:16
Torre del Mar-based calligraphy artist Gema Martínez (Madrid, 1968) has a new exhibition, Evocâre, through which she explores the mechanism of memory through calligraphy, at the eastern Costa del Sol town's tourist information office.
Martínez is a fomer journalist who developed her passion and talent for writing through the artistic genre and trained with the national and international masters of calligraphy. Through her work she explores calligraphy through distortion, superimposition and the invention of new signs.
Evocâre (to bring forth, to summon, to call out) offers the audience a journey akin to a pagan liturgy: atmospheric pieces that prepare the space, a circle that delimits and protects it, repetition as ritual and invocation and, finally, the word, which emerges to give form to the invisible.
In this exhibition, the artist observes the mechanisms of memory and transforms them into writing; layers that overlap and settle; memories that fade or resurface with intensity only to vanish once more. Poems from childhood that linger, refrains and words that encapsulate emotional states. Blue functions here as both an inner and outer landscape: a space where memory and forgetting coexist in a continuous present.
“The artistic experimentation I have been pursuing for over a decade centres on questioning the roles assigned to us and the roles we assign to ourselves,” explains Martínez. “I have done this through writing, which I strip of its function as something to be read, to see what happens.”
To explore the aesthetic possibilities of handwriting, Martínez alters shapes, repeats symbols, breaks lines and goes beyond the margins to creates alphabets using the empty spaces within words. “Illegible writing, freed from its functionality, is then transformed into textures, visual compositions, pictograms and sensations," the artist explains.
The exhibition can be viewed at Torre del Mar's tourist office on Calle Pte until Sunday 3 May from 9am to 2pm and from 5pm to 8pm every day.
