Migratory Movements, a solo exhibition of new works by Oswaldo Maciá, was developed during his 2025 residency at the Elizabeth Xi Bauer gallery’s studio. Known for his pioneering multisensory practice, Maciá expands sculpture beyond the visual, using sound, smell, drawing and frescoes to explore the invisible systems that sustain life. The exhibition celebrates movement, cross-pollination, and environmental interdependence.
For more than two decades, his artistic practice has developed what he calls Olfactory Acoustic Composition – a new artistic language grounded in the “volumes of smell and sound”. The compositions are drawn from field recordings made in rainforests, deserts, and polar regions, combined with a vast “smell library” developed through years of collaboration with perfumers and scientists.
As you walk around the installation, a series of “notes” for a sculptural composition brings together visual observations on the communication and interdependence between species, such as insects and flowers, alongside olfactory reflections on consciousness.
The sound is embedded within benches designed in collaboration with the noted product and furniture designer Jasper Morrison. It is informed by the philosopher John Wilkins’ 1668 attempt to systematically catalogue the animals said to have boarded Noah’s Ark. The displayed pastels, frescoes, and ink works on paper, interact with both sound and smell, seeking to register the continuous movement of often unseen forces in the natural world.
Maciá commented: “I am always seeking to extend the language of sculpture using sound and smell as well as vision to create volumes in space. This selection of movements is a kind of monument to celebrate migration in nature – whether plants, animals or humans – and the cross-pollination that all life depends upon. While I work with these forces, I am trying to create the opposite of stagnation.”
The Colombian-born artist, shows us that ‘magical realism’, the genre developed by his fellow countryman, the great late Nobel Prize-winning writer García Marquez, is still very much alive in multiple formats, vibrating around the walls of the gallery.
‘Migratory Movements’ by Oswaldo Maciá
5 Dec 2025 – 15 Feb 2026
Elizabeth Xi Bauer gallery
20-22 Exmouth Market
London
EC1R 4QE
Images courtesy of the Artist and Elizabeth Xi Bauer, London.
