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© 2025 Carmen de la Roca
Carmen Roca Igual (b.1998, Paris) lived in many places, but always with a kind of nostalgia for what she never got to experience in Spain. Her work is bold, fun, and magnetic.
She is fascinated by windows and facades, by the frames that outline what’s inside and what we leave out. Who we are with others vs. who we are when we’re alone. Who watches us and how being watched affects us. She is a little obsessed with representation—both in real life and online—and with the possibility of freeing ourselves from how we might be perceived. As a child, she thought someone above was watching her, and if she picked her nose, she tried to do it as prettily as possible. Something of that still lingers in her work: that in-between space between the intimate and the public, between what is true and what only seems to be. Her exhibitions feature balconies and windows, and inside them, characters in their homes: one watches TV, another takes a selfie, another rubs cream on their pregnancy stretch marks. Our thoughts unfold at the same time as life goes on in the house next door. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague in 2020. Her work has been shown in exhibitions such as Prospects (Art Rotterdam, 2024), Meanwhile, in the Glossy Interface (Galerija Novo and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Croatia, 2024), and Tan Lines from a Spiritual Retweet (1646, The Hague, 2022). She has received support from the Mondriaan Fonds for emerging artists, and KPMG acquired her work at Art Rotterdam. She has collaborated with artists such as Amalia Ulman and Pauline Curnier Jardin, working as an assistant director and set designer. Her films, Novel (2020) and Apatía y Devoción (2022), explore identity, technology, and perception in the digital age.
Carmen is supported by Artist Start Mondriaan Funds.