Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Vida Detenida’
Verona, Italy
04 September 2025
Opera Gallery is delighted to share the news of ‘Vida Detenida’, a new photography exhibition by acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, on view from 20 September to 21 October 2025. This personal body of work reflects Almodóvar’s ongoing exploration of still life and memory through the lens of photography—an artistic path Opera Gallery has proudly accompanied in previous exhibitions in Madrid.
‘Vida Detenida’ is the main project of the eighth edition of the Grenze Arsenali Fotografici photography festival in Verona. Hosted at The Meccanico Gallery, the exhibition features a series of still life photographs depicting everyday objects, stripped of the vibrant cinematic colour typically associated with the director’s films. Instead, they are rendered in quiet domestic repose, revealing a melancholic and solitary essence.
In ‘Vida Detenida’—which translates more precisely as "life held in suspension" rather than simply "still life"—Almodóvar transforms the quiet corners of his home into expressive compositions. Capturing the light that spills across countertops, the shape of a flower in decline, or the melancholy of a forgotten object, these photographs are elegies to the ordinary, rendered extraordinary through his gaze. “Still lifes are a pagan form of altar that venerates and worships objects,” Almodóvar writes. His camera, guided not by technical manipulation but by instinct and emotion, seeks to preserve the fleeting sensation of a moment.
Known globally for his bold and emotionally charged cinema, Almodóvar's turn to photography reveals the same sensitivity, but distilled through stillness rather than movement. These images echo the intimate, colour-saturated worlds of his films, yet they also carve out a new, contemplative space—one less theatrical, more introspective.
As art critic Simone Azzoni writes, Almodóvar’s work inhabits the border between domestic reality and metaphysical inquiry. His images, composed of sockets, flowers, plates and curtains, are “slashes of time” that suspend the viewer in a fragile present. Though devoid of narrative, they hum with latent emotion and cinematic memory. They are not film stills, but life stilled.
Pedro Almodóvar’s artistic journey—across cinema, photography, writing and performance—has long been defined by a refusal to separate the personal from the political, the everyday from the iconic. Born in La Mancha, raised during Franco’s Spain, and shaped by the underground currents of Madrid’s La Movida movement, he has always found his voice in the tension between beauty and resistance, light and shadow.
We encourage our collectors and visitors to discover this new exhibition and to immerse themselves in the luminous, suspended world of Pedro Almodóvar’s still lifes.
