Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas kicks off a series of four exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in London featuring works from the ”la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art selected by internationally acclaimed authors. In addition to guest-curating the display, each author was also asked to write a book to accompany their show. This innovative partnership between the two institutions sought to offer a radical alternative to the usual approach to exhibiting and reading art collections.

In “Cabinet d'amateur”, an oblique novel, Enrique Vila-Matas reflects on art and his own mental and literary life by using the six works he selected from the collection to weave his own narrative through both the exhibition space and the pages of the book. “There’s a frayed thread running through the six selected works that mirrors my own literary career,” he says. “The fleeting cabinet—home to real people, as well as the negatives of certain images, ghostly apparitions and a healthy dash of intertextuality—was also a minimalist tribute to Georges Perec on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of his book Un cabinet d’amateur, in 1979.”

The central work in the show is Gerhard Richter’s portrait I. G. , which Vila-Matas describes as “a powerful reversal of a portrait of a woman”. For him, this piece questions the art of portraiture in the same way that he uses his writing to explore literature. Beginning with this haunting painting, Vila-Matas then goes on to reflect on his own life and literature by linking together the remaining five pieces: Dominique González Foerster’s installation Petite, in which her childhood makes a present-day appearance; the video La lección respiratoria by Dora García, an artist who also has close ties to the literary world; Carlos Pazos’s nostalgic self-portrait, Milonga, which for Vila-Matas evokes the end of the party for his own generation; Miquel Barceló’s painting Une poignée de terre, which puts the author’s feet firmly back on the ground; and finally, in stark contrast to the close-up of what could be the warm soil of Vila-Matas’s homeland, Andreas Gursky’s distant photograph offering an aerial perspective of the ruins of Thebes, freeing the writer of all sense of belonging and ownership.