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Factum Arte has produced Behold Humanity, Grayson Perry's new tapestry for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2026. Inspired by conversations with leading figures in artificial intelligence during the filming of Grayson Perry Has Seen the Future, the work explores what it means to be human in an age increasingly shaped by AI.
Drawing on the visual language of the Orthodox Christian Epitaphios, Perry replaces traditional biblical figures with portraits of some of today's leading AI thinkers, creating a powerful reflection on humanity, technology and the body.
Behold Humanity is on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 16 June to 23 August 2026.
Factum Arte worked with New York-based artist Tschabalala Self to fabricate Art Lovers, a monumental sculptural work installed on the façade of the New Museum on the Bowery as part of the institution's expansion designed by OMA.
Standing over four metres high and cast in aluminium, the sculpture depicts two figures locked in an embrace. Factum Arte's involvement spanned the full fabrication process: from detailed 3D modelling developed in close collaboration with the artist, to casting at Fademesa foundry in Madrid, to an entirely hand-painted finish in which each floral motif and surface texture was worked individually to preserve the tactile complexity characteristic of Self's practice.
The sculpture is installed at the precise junction between the New Museum's original SANAA-designed building and the new OMA expansion — a point the architects themselves have described as a "kiss point" — making Self's work both a formal and symbolic response to the architecture it inhabits.
Image © Courtesy Tschabalala Self Studio
For Zayed National Museum, which opened to the public on 3 December 2025, Factum Arte has realised an extensive body of artworks and installations now permanently on view in Abu Dhabi. Conceived as a tribute to the legacy of the UAE’s Founding Father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the museum—designed by Foster + Partners—brings together architecture, landscape and material culture at an unprecedented scale.
Between 2023 and 2025, and working under the guidance of Dr. Peter Magee and the team at Zayed National Museum, Factum Arte developed a wide range of sculptural works, reconstructions and immersive environments that give physical form to the natural and cultural histories of the Emirates. The projects were shaped through sustained dialogue with curators, historians, scientists and craftspeople, drawing on research, advanced digital technologies and hands-on making across Spain and the UAE.
From large-scale sculptural commissions to carefully researched reconstructions and immersive installations, these works explore how knowledge, memory and material can coexist in the museum space. Together they reflect years of collaboration, experimentation and commitment to making heritage tangible, legible and alive for future generations.
We are delighted to share that Fern — the self-supporting bronze replica of the Diplodocus carnegii 20th-century plaster cast skeleton at the Natural History Museum — has been recognised at the Structural Awards 2025.
The project was celebrated for its engineering excellence, with Structure Workshop receiving the award. Factum Arte joined them on stage, represented by William Owen, who appears second from the left, standing beside Peter Laidler (far left) and Max Clatton (far right) of Structure Workshop.
This recognition highlights the ambition and complexity of the work. Factum Arte collaborated closely with Structure Workshop, Fademesa Foundry in Madrid, and the Natural History Museum to realise this 25-metre-long bronze sculpture — one of the largest and most technically demanding projects completed by our team.
The judges described Fern as “a technically challenging and beautifully executed project that demonstrates the versatility of structural engineering. The team resolved complex post-tensioning and geometric challenges with care and intelligence, creating a form that engages the public and reinforces the profession’s role in shaping imaginative, visible work.”
Installed in 2024 in the museum’s refurbished gardens as part of the Urban Nature Project, supported by the Kusuma Trust, Fern continues to welcome visitors and highlight the intersection of engineering, craft, and creativity.
For the past two years, Factum Arte has been collaborating with Paula Crown to produce a bell that transforms text and drawings into sculptural bronze.
Inspired by Tibetan Prayer Wheels and the Japanese epigram "the reverse side also has a reverse side" (物事には裏に裏がある - monogoto niwa ura ni ura ga aru), the bell, cast in Spain in an amazing feat of bell making, explores themes of hidden complexity and layered meaning. The embossed and debossed text reads around the bell, each creating a visual and acoustic rhythm. As with most oriental bells, it is struck from the outside with either a specially-made stainless steel or wooden clapper. The sound is mesmerising, rising, falling and resonating in a hypnotic way. The Reverse Side Bell embodies themes that resonate with history, especially with the destruction of bells from during World War II.
The production of this artist bell is part of the ongoing fight to save London's Bell Foundry in Whitechapel. The bell is currently on display at Sunnylands, Palm Springs (California), a historic estate that has been a retreat for U.S. presidents and a convening place for world leaders since 1966. Since 2012, Sunnylands has hosted world leaders and experts in a range of fields to address national and international issues.
More about Paula Crown's work with Factum Arte
Photo © Braden Weeks Earp
Over the years, the tapestry created for Rachid Koraïchi's Jardin d'Afrique has been part of several exhibitions, spreading awareness about Koraïchi's non-denominational sanctuary for migrants who lost their lives crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Sadly, this remarkable and generous work of art has recently been subjected to iconoclastic and racist attacks.
Jardin d'Afrique is currently part of the exhibition 'Shared Sacred Sites. Journeys between religions' at Villa Medici in Rome (9 October 2025 - 19 January 2026). The exhibition focuses on the religious phenomenon of sanctuaries shared by worshippers of different religions in the Mediterranean. Koraïchi's tapestry is exhibited among works on loan from the Vatican Museums, the Museo Ebraico di Roma, the MAXXI, the Louvre Museum and the Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée.
It took years for the processes developed by Daguerre, Fox Talbot and Niépce to develop into the language we associate with photography. Now digital imaging has taken over. In the move from film and wet printing processes, artists are celebrating the materiality of light-based medium and pushing the boundaries.
Richard Learoyd is doing some great work in the area around Fox Talbot’s home at Lacock Abbey. The images emerging from Factum’s flatbed printer are materialised on canvas, pushed back with layers of liquid gesso, drawn and over-printed. The layered images have a subtle beauty that dissolves the artificial separation between printing and painting.
This way of working requires the artist to be present during the printing. Intuitive and spontaneous decisions need to be made. He is aided by Amanda Blázquez and Marta Collado as they work the printer and prepare the materials.
More on Richard Learoyd's work with Factum Arte
Susana Solano has unveiled PELÍCANO (2025), a table/sculpture developed as part of the Catalina D'Anglade’s ARCOmadrid Award 2024. The piece has been crafted in wood and metal with movable wings in Factum’s workshops
Solano is one of Spain's most significant contemporary sculptors and a key influence on emerging artists. Her work merges industrial materials and spatial exploration. PELÍCANO plays with the 'wings’ that can be opened on tables to accommodate more people and the memory of a large pelican at Lake Chamo in Ethiopia.
The Catalina D’Anglade ARCOmadrid Award consists in the acquisition of an artwork during the art fair by a Spanish artist or an artist working in Spain. This is followed by a commission of an object that merges art and design.
Foto courtesy Catalina D'Anglade Art
Gaussian Splatting is a new way of creating realistic 3D images by placing millions of tiny, semi-transparent dots in space—each one holding information about colour, depth, and how it reacts to light. Instead of building objects out of sharp edges and flat surfaces, it creates soft, detailed scenes that feel more natural and lifelike. To help with this, it uses a technique called spherical harmonics, which allows the computer to simulate how light wraps around curved surfaces—like how sunlight gently fades across a face or a sculpture. This also means it can capture tricky materials like glass or shiny metal, showing reflections and transparency in ways older methods struggled with. The result is a faster, more efficient way to turn real-world photos into immersive 3D experiences. - Otto Lowe
One year ago, the bronze Diplodocus was unveiled at the Natural History Museum in London. It was probably the most complex and challenging work Factum Arte has made in collaboration with its partners at Fademesa Foundry in Madrid and Structure Workshop in London. A year on, the museum is celebrating its impact with a film featuring paleontologist Paul Barrett.
Video © Natural History Museum, London
Watch on Youtube
More about creating Fern
Following the Seated sculpture series that began in 2022 with Tschabalala Self’s first public sculpture and solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias Gallery, Factum Arte worked with the artist on two new editions: Seated Woman 1 and Seated Man 2. Both were exhibited at Art Basel 2025 (19–22 June) at Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s booth.
The sculptures were 3D-modelled at Factum Arte, cast in bronze at Kaparos Foundry in Greece, and painted in Madrid based on the artist’s original drawings. The focus was on translating Self’s bold, physical brushwork onto a primed three-dimensional form, using layers of paint and acrylic markers before applying a final wax coating.
More on the project
Photo © Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Artist Paula Crown returned to Factum Arte for a new residency, immersing herself in a series of sculptural explorations centred on the visual and material qualities of flowers. Reimagining petals as abstract sculptural forms, Crown experimented with elevated printing techniques to bring out striking contrasts of texture and colour.
This residency is the latest chapter in a long-standing and evolving collaboration between Crown and Factum Arte, which has brought to life a wide range of ambitious projects since 2012.
More on Paula Crown's work with Factum Arte
We are proud to announce that Adam Lowe, Director of Factum Arte and Founder of Factum Foundation, has been awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the King’s Birthday Honours List 2025 for his services to the arts.
This honour recognises Adam’s long-standing commitment to new approaches in the making of artworks. It also acknowledges his work in preserving and transforming cultural heritage through a fusion of technology, innovation, and traditional craftsmanship.
Adam created Factum Arte with Manuel Franquelo and Nando Guereta in 2001. From the beginning, it was imagined as a playground, a space where technology and craft could meet without hierarchy or preconception.
Since then, Adam has shaped Factum into a place that invites us to look at the world with curious eyes. It has become a model that values ideas and breaks down barriers between disciplines in a world increasingly focused on professionalism and compartmentalisation. Factum is where artists come to experiment, test ideas, challenge their vision, and create works at every scale and in every medium.
In 2009, he founded the Factum Foundation to apply this creative approach to the management and preservation of cultural heritage. Since then, the Foundation has become an international reference, not only for museums and conservators, but also for academics, scientists, engineers, architects, and thinkers across disciplines.
This award recognises Adam’s role in shaping both organisations and allowing many artists and institutions to benefit from them. It celebrates a vision built on collaboration, experimentation, and care for art, culture, and the tools we use to understand and protect them.
We are proud to celebrate Adam’s OBE.
Nicolas Béliard – Head of Communications
After the solo exhibition 'Viewfinder. A way of seeing' at Serrería Belga in Madrid last year, we are proud to share another step in Boris Savelev's life in Spain – the publication of Diario galego: un portfolio de guerra, and a major retrospective exhibition of his photographic work at Cidade da Cultura de Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, opening on 12 June 2025 at the Museo Centro Gaiás until October. The exhibition was curated by Adam Lowe in collaboration with Nuria Medina and organised by La Fábrica. It was Savelev’s first major show since he was awarded the Premio PHotoESPAÑA in 2024.
Created during his recent years in Spain following his displacement from Ukraine, Diario galego is both a personal and artistic journey—an introspective “war” with photography shaped by exile, memory, and the rediscovery of everyday beauty in cities like Vigo and Cambados.
This new portfolio was printed at Factum Arte in Madrid using a method developed with Savelev over years of collaboration. During this time Boris has pushed the boundaries of both traditional and digital printing. Diario galego reflects on war, resilience, and the poetic nuances of light and place.
More on Boris Savelev's works with Factum Arte
"In this short video, filmed 15 years ago, Manuel Franquelo (1953-2024) demonstrates one of his first prototypes of the Lucida 3D Scanner. Towards the end of the recording, he points at one of the renders on screen, explaining that the result "is not absolutely perfect, but it is rather correct, and much better than we had before with the Reversa system". This short video condenses much of Franquelo's approach to work and life: an honest, constant pursuit of precision, as a meaningful way to represent the true surface of objects around us. Since its completion in 2011, Lucida has been used to digitise hundreds of artworks around the world, and it continues to do so as an essential component of many preservation projects. One year after Manuel sadly passed away, we all in Factum remember him as an inspiration."
- Carlos Bayod Lucini (Madrid, 28 May 2025)
For his upcoming exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (29 May - 9 August 2025), Richard Learoyd worked with Amanda Blázquez and Marina Luchetti to make several images of trees taken near Lacock Abbey.
By printing on Belgian linen, washing the surface, applying thin layers of gesso and reprinting, the result inhabits a space between painting and pictorialist photography. The images are large scale and powerful but refer back to the time when William Fox Talbot was developing photography at Lacock Abbey. He called his invention the ‘pencil of nature’. It’s a description that fits Richard Learoyd’s new creations.
The five proposals for the Queen Elizabeth II Memorial in St James’s Park have all been presented and the period of public comment has closed. The decision of committee reviewing the proposals will be announced soon. Our proposal, led by landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith, will transform the centre of St James’s park if it is selected. The focal point will be an exact bronze cast of the Signing Oak, one of the ancient tree's in Windsor Great Park. Jamie Fobert’s beautiful bridge is designed on a curve defined by the trees gravitational pull. A gently curving memorial path—crafted from stones from quarries across Britain and interwoven with bronze objects and a soundscape of voices—creates a public space that honours the Queen’s life and legacy.
Render © SLAB
For 'Delusions of Grandeur' (March 28 - October 26, 2025), one of Grayson Perry's largest shows in the UK and the largest contemporary art exhibition at the Wallace Collection, Factum Arte worked with the artist on the production of four new works: three tapestries (Swing Tapestry, The Story of My Life and Modern, Beautiful and Good) and a hand-tufted wool rug (Heaven's Gate).
More on Factum Arte's work with Grayson Perry
Image © Trustees of the Wallace Collection
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