Montserrat Soto studied at the Massana School in Barcelona and continued her training in France, specifically in Grenoble and Paris. Her first important exhibition was at Espai 13 at the Miró Foundation in Barcelona in 1994.

Her work, which basically shifts between photography, video and installation, is structured around two major themes: art spaces and landscape through travel. She builds her projects based on series, which follow some of those concerns. Soto has reflected on memory in art spaces, as in her major series Secret Landscape (2004), for which she photographed the houses of major art collectors so that curious viewers could view them through a gap.

Her landscape output comprises photos of natural areas and architecture. These are settings where human beings are omitted as subjects but can be tracked by the traces that they have left; places where the passing of time can be appreciated and there is an atmosphere of solitude that some authors have identified with interior landscapes. Her large format works are usually installed in the exhibition space, generating a trompe l’oeil through which the viewer moves; another space which cannot be accessed physically but which can be entered mentally and where they can imagine what is left outside the frame. In the words of Aurora García, “it is the viewer with their moving body and their internal configuration who becomes the real character in her works’.

Soto has staged solo shows at the Sala Montcada (Barcelona, 1996); the Koldo Mitxelena Kulturuneko (San Sebastián, 2004); the Telefónica Foundation (Madrid, 2004); the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2005); el Centre d’Art La Panera (Lleida, 2006); the Patio Herreriano Museum (Valladolid, 2007); and the Santa Mónica Art Centre (Barcelona, 2007), among others.

Isabel Tejeda