Joan Fontcuberta

Why this artist matters now

In his photography-oriented practice, Joan Fontcuberta challenges the authority of his medium to examine the subjectivity of truth and perception. His work questions the dogma of media, technology, religion, medicine, government, academia, the art world, and science, such as in Fauna Secret, where he created an archive of realistic documents describing fictitious plants and animals—like winged monkeys with unicorn horns—which he exhibited as a genuine scientific catalog. In other work, Fontcuberta has repurposed geographic software, originally designed to render photorealistic landscapes from scanned data (like maps), by loading images such as landscape paintings by Paul Cézanne or Salvador Dalí, or scans of his body parts. The software translates these into hyperrealistic scenes of lakes, mountains, and skies. Fontcuberta also creates photomosaics, compiled with images conjured from Google search, in order to explore the anonymous discourse of the Internet.

Source: Moma Bulk 2026 05 04 · Trust score: 92% · Updated 25d ago