Inside Patricia Urquiola's imaginative retrospective in Belgium

Patricia Urquiola works displayed in exhibition space

(Image credit: CaroLine Dethier)

Unveiled earlier this week at the CID – Centre for Innovation and Design at Grand-Hornu in Belgium, Patricia Urquiola. Meta-Morphosa (on view until 26 April 2026) offers a focused look at the Spanish designer’s work from the past five years. The survey is presented as part of Europalia España, the Belgium-based international arts festival dedicated this year to Spanish culture. Rather than a conventional retrospective, the exhibition homes in on Urquiola’s ongoing research into materials and making, spanning furniture, textiles, surfaces and experimental installations.

Across the exhibition, Urquiola’s practice is framed through the idea of metamorphosis: objects that shift between craft and industry, tradition and technology, familiarity and invention. Many of the works on display explore hybrid materials and regenerative processes, including recycled wool, plastics, wood, glass and marble, reflecting the designer’s long-standing interest in circularity and the full lifecycle of products. Digital tools also play a role, informing both production methods and the increasingly fluid, organic language of her recent designs.

The scenography leans into Urquiola’s more imaginative impulses. Hybrid creatures, marine forms and fantastical details appear across rugs, stools and surfaces, highlighting a personal visual language that is brought into sharp focus by the exhibition format.

Urquiola's large body of work is typically absorbed in fragments, its narrative dispersed across showrooms, trade shows and design events where she is typically presenting a single product with a brand. Brought together in one place, however, these critter-like forms and organic references reveal themselves as a consistent undercurrent, allowing connections to be drawn between projects and a more coherent sense of Urquiola’s creative universe to emerge. The grouping also sharpens the tactile dimension of her work – the emphasis on surface, softness and material touch – which can be harder to register when pieces are encountered in isolation.

This sense of an ‘inner world’ culminates in the final room, centred on a large tapestry inspired by the journey of Saint Anthony in the desert of the Thebaid – used here as a metaphor for learning and transformation. The surrounding iconographic elements extend this narrative.

A short philosophical thread runs through the exhibition via a conversation with Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia, whose reflections on metamorphosis frame change as a continuous, inevitable condition of life. As Coccia puts it, it is ‘the closest that life comes to death’. In Urquiola’s hands, however, metamorphosis is less about rupture than adaptation – an ongoing process of forming, deforming and recomposing in response to a world, and an industry, in transition.

Patricia Urquiola. Meta-Morphosa runs through 26 April 2026

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Ali Morris is a UK-based editor, writer and creative consultant specialising in design, interiors and architecture. In her 16 years as a design writer, Ali has travelled the world, crafting articles about creative projects, products, places and people for titles such as Dezeen, Wallpaper* and Kinfolk.