In art, poetry and myth, gardens are paradise—places of earthly delights, midsummer dreams and suffering.
The Garden of Banca March in Madrid is a private garden now as public space, hosting the sculptures of Thomas Houseago, whose work is the private in a public place.
In the Irish writer and director Neil Jordan’s recently published book of fiction The Library of Traumatic Memory, the central conceit concerns what it is to remember and what it costs to forget. One finds the line:
‘He (Christian) found it unbearable to grieve in private.’
Houseago’s world is born out of traumatic memory as much as current introspective philosophies on extinction.
© Photography: Pablo Gómez-Ogando.
Because a portion of Houseago’s innocence was stolen, it was replaced with instinctual optimism as radical medicine. Houseago is the infantilised yet Wise Child—the dream Pablo Picasso strived for in his practice and underlined in his quote:
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
David Hockney might be Houseago’s “gay dad”—an expression Houseago himself uses—but for this exhibit, Angela Carter is mother, with her gardens as subversions of patriarchal limits.
People often think of gardens as the outside place one goes, but one also goes inside, and they are places of introspection. Gardens can be manicured, or they can run wild. Here, Houseago’s work, and its excellent curation by Anne Pontegnie in the Banca March garden, appears to blend both: dream and nightmare, order with beauty, intimacy with escape.
Personally, passing through the security of the oldest and last remaining family-owned Spanish bank, Banca March, and into its garden, one has the feeling of being lowered by rope into the Cave of Montesinos—where one might fall asleep and awaken, like Don Quixote, in a beautiful garden and ask: ” Are we here for three days and three nights?
Perhaps dreaming with the shade of Miguel de Cervantes, who has floated the 3km from the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians to tiptoe amongst Houseago’s liquid plaster and steel rebar feet, propping up his squatting Moon figure. Or is Sancho Panza bringing me back into the real world—tugging on that rope, asking me to crawl out via the hollow bronze cave of Houseago’s Rock Head III?
A sculpture with its myopic eye—the fixed stare of Narcissus—a colossal gaze like the Cyclops, sans a soft tissue brain inside to break its own egoic spell.
There are no poor works by Houseago on show wandering inside the Banca March garden—it’s all killer, no filler.
And Madrid has special gardens. The vertical garden at the CaixaForum Madrid in the heart of Madrid’s cultural district uses soilless hydroponic systems, designed by the French botanist Patrick Blanc.
There is the private studio garden of the philosopher and landscape designer Fernando Caruncho, with its open staircase slice minimalism amongst the Japanese karesansui dry garden sweep of sand. There is Álvaro Sampedro’s eco water gardens.
And then there is the culturally significant garden where Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí first dreamed together in the historic gardens at the Residencia de Estudiantes.
The Banca March garden hosting Houseago’s sculpture is also special, as special as the seeds sown by the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez into Lorca. Why not? Certain spaces are intrinsically geomantic, psychogeographic—possessing a resonance that can erupt and imprint a kind of egregore.
Is it the seed, the place, or the sower?
Indeed, what is a garden? Across the concrete carriageway, in a hurtling car speeding like a futurist, I spy Torres Blancas—a mixed-use concrete building designed in 1961 by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza. It too is a continuous, curved climbing garden—one of concrete organic architecture.
Is Houseago’s sculpture, therefore, not only in a garden—is it also the garden?
In the beginning was the garden. Then Cain murdered Abel; the first murderer founded the first city—and the metropolis is everywhere. So now, in cities, we make do. Madrid appears to be making an effort with its Metropolitan Forest: street trees of European nettle, pine, poplar, acacia, elm and London plane, formally planted along boulevards, moving in the breeze and shuddering in the traumatic pollution.
© Photography: Pablo Gómez-Ogando.
Sculpture—if it is any good—is the monument of the body of nature, that is, our body, the somatic experience. It has to move and process like the street trees in Madrid and cities everywhere.
Houseago’s work, despite its own formal planting, has the freedom of the self-taught. It appears to have shed restraints. Here we have hints of something older: wooden totems carved from lightning-struck redwoods; echoes of ethnography; buried African fetish masks unearthed from disturbed earth in his aluminium Giant; or in his mixed-media Venice head.
Or the Aztec bleed-through of his recurring death skull masks—atop the shoulders of his wooden Janus or walking dead bronze figure.
Houseago’s world is infused with memory. The early work carries spontaneity and immediacy—found street-junk necessity as the mother of invention: crudely bent industrial rebar, rusted screws haphazardly applied, free-flung plaster in must-do urgency.
The current work, despite scaling into expensive bronze and larger volumes, thankfully maintains this earlier freedom—escaping hollow instant gratification and the tyranny of slickness as commodity.
The work is raw—not like sushi, but like Houseago.
Thomas Houseago is unfiltered yet articulate. He talks of abuse, shame, embarrassment—and not just in private. Though English, he has shed politeness as mask, even as he deals with masks. His freedom is not for the happily enslaved—the voluntary servitude of Étienne de La Boétie—nor the suppressed etiquette of English manners.
The more he makes people uncomfortable, the more I warm to him. Forget the work as object—see it as blended: unity, biography, poetry.
His work acts as if moving, alive—shedding the static.
Houseago himself, meanwhile, gives off his own static. One can imagine he tests conventional curators—the gatekeeping English probably run a mile. Thankfully, it’s a big world, and he is in exile.
Houseago appeared in 2019 as that rare thing: a non-RA Academician exhibiting in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts. One might presume it was his guardian angel, Hockney, who prised open the gate.
If the dead end of English art needed a final coup de grâce, it would be for the sculptural work of Eric Gill to be reduced to dust, flushed, and Houseago’s Large Walking Figure 1 to stare down BBC HQ on Portland Place until Earth’s extinction.
© Photography: Pablo Gómez-Ogando.
After this eulogy of thought, I find myself with Houseago, inspecting his tattoos—more like prison tattoos than fashion. Sensing testosterone, he shows only me and my Russian-speaking pirate friend Serji his grizzly bear chest piece, the result of a near-death wildlife encounter with Flea.
Thomas recounts how Flea sang to the bear—a polite interspecies permission song—asking whether they might pass.
We move rapidly through visions: Sequoia redwoods, druids, relics of tree worship, Himalayan bodhisattvas. What feels like forty minutes is more likely 2.5 seconds in the Banca March dream garden.
Being with Thomas is like inhabiting a collapsed narrative—a soft-focus ayahuasca lens snapping into harsh clarity. One finds this only among good art comrades. It’s refreshing, though he is clearly absorbing plasma elsewhere—a fair transactional exchange, the grit that produces the pearl of art.
I have known Houseago five minutes. Yet, on this shimmering path, anything feels possible.
But back to Earth—what of this work in its broader cultural context?
Emile Torday, a Hungarian-born anthropologist who began as a banker in Belgium, collected significant African artefacts—many entering European collections at the same time Picasso encountered African forms, including the fetish sculpture of the Children of Woot from the Kuba of the Congo.
Picasso tapped their power to create Cubism—abstracting form into a new visual language. These objects infected others, altering the trajectory of modern art.
Houseago resonates with Picasso, as Picasso resonates with Congolese forms. Art that was once utilitarian, functional, fetish—often buried by its makers—held real power.
Spain feels like Houseago’s spiritual homeland. His assistants in California are Mexican—perhaps he is the conquistador who has gone native. Or perhaps he has simply come home, in the garden of Banca March, with the ghost of Francisco Goya reminding him that the garden is also nocturnal.
As Buñuel said:
“I love my dreams, especially my nightmares.”
Thomas Houseago ‘Esculturas’, March 1st May – 30th, October 2026 Jardin Banca March, Madrid
