As an architect, artist, and researcher, Diego Delas develops a practice grounded in study and making, engaging processes of reconstruction, repetition, and reinterpretation of a pre-modern culture in decline. His work approaches vernacular architecture, magical thinking, and domestic narratives as forms of knowledge that precede modernity.

Through textiles, installation, and painting, Delas investigates now-vanished ways of life —rural and pre-modern— in which animals and humans coexisted on the same plane, where house, labour, and the natural cycles of life and death formed an indivisible whole. In this context, the artistic object appears intrinsically linked to the domestic sphere: marks, inscriptions, and signs associated with protection, fortune, or ritual.

His practice generates an amalgam of processes in which an interest in the vernacular house converges with an ethics of manual labour and an anthropology of the magical and the secular. Using construction materials and elements drawn from domestic practices, such as patchworks, reclaimed textiles, and structural fragments, his works evoke the symbolic function of the talisman and the amulet.

Delas studied Architecture and Fine Arts in Madrid before continuing his academic development in London, where he completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art and later earned a doctorate at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

Throughout his career, he has received prestigious fellowships and awards, including the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership at the University of Oxford and, more recently, a grant from Fundación Botín. His work has also been selected by institutions and prizes such as Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary – TBA21 Academy, the Cervezas Alhambra Emerging Art Prize, the Paulo Cunha e Silva Prize, Generaciones, the Fundación Montemadrid Prize, BARCU Art Fair in Bogotá, the Lucy Halford Bursary, the Windfall Bursary, and the RCA (HEFCE) Student Bursary at the Royal College of Art, among others.

His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and is held in prominent public and private collections, including MUSAC (Museum of Contemporary Art of Castile and León), Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Fundación Montemadrid, Colección DKV, Colección Kells, and Colección Cervezas Alhambra, among others.

Diego Delas, 2020. Image by Sergio Albert.