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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.

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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.

Read Boris Savelev's words

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

Leonor Serrano Rivas has been developing her Rythm Patterns series of tapestries with Factum for several years. Each artwork consists of five textile panels forming a single unit, with both the front and the back of each tapestry being an important part of the work. Rythm Pattern #1 was shown at ARCO 2024. Two new tapestries are now on display at carlier|gebauer Berlin until June 21st: 'Here Be Dragons' is Rivas' first solo exhibition in Germany.

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Several works created by Marguerite Humeau at Factum Arte are featured in 'Torches', her first solo show in Denmark, at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen until 19 October 2025.

The Holder of Wasp Venom, The Guardian of the Fungus Garden and The Guardian of Ancient Yeast were created in 2023, when Humeau spent several months working alongside the artisans in Factum using natural beeswax, microcrystalline wax, pigments and ashes. These pieces are the result of an intense, hands-on collaboration—where experimentation, craft, and shared vision converged to push the boundaries of both form and material.

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Photo © Marguerite Humeau. Photography by Mathilde Agius. Courtesy of the artist

When it rains in Dubai it can really pour. This was the case when we were installing the sculpture Union of Artists in Dubai in 2024.

The design is a site-specific installation by the five artists shortlisted for Art Dubai 2023 who chose to collaborate to produce a single work. We were working on a very tight deadline and to meet the clients' needs and we installed throughout a storm that lasted several days, causing extensive flooding. A considerable amount of water got inside the columns during the installation and some of it was trapped there. The force of this water as it evaporated and condensed in the varying temperatures over a year caused some unexpected problems.

A Factum Arte team has just finished the repair work, and the sculpture looks amazing with the recently installed marble base.

Laura Merage approached Factum Arte in 2023 with a desire to create a tapestry. The resulting series, Genesis, weaves images of the artist's mother into silk Jacquard, interwoven with lurex threads. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 were on display at the 2025 Contemporary Art Survey in Lincoln Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, until 13 June 2025.

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Photo © Jennifer Bohlig

Adam Lowe, director of Factum Arte, is part of the shortlisted team in the open design competition for the Queen Elizabeth II Memorial, organised by the UK government and run by Malcolm Reading Consultants.

Led by landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith with Jamie Fobert Architects and Structure Workshop, the proposal envisions a reflective landscape in St James’s Park. At its centre is an exact bronze cast of a thousand-year-old oak tree from Windsor Great Park, representing the Queen's strength and endurance, but also her love of nature. More on the proposal
Video © SLAB

From 2019 to 2021, Factum Arte worked with Paula Crown on the production of a bronze version of her celebrated ‘JOKESTER’ sculpture. Titled Resilience, it reinvents the crushed and compacted form of a Solo cup in a new medium.

After display at the Rockefeller Centre in 2023, Resilience was recently installed in the sculpture park at Paradox Cove in Austin, Texas.

More on the production of Resilience

The purity of sound of any bell is conditioned by the alloy and the perfect casting in a single pour of a copper and tin alloy. We just completed two bells for Jan Hendrix – they were cast in Spain and have not yet been tuned, but the sound is mesmerising as it fades away with subtle changes happening in the way the bell vibrates.

More about The London Bell Foundry

More about Jan Hendrix's work with Factum Arte

Paula Crown's bell, inspired by ceremonial Buddhist bells, is currently being cast in Spain. The artist's design features a series of messages in different languages, overlaid at different sizes and depths.

Among the great examples of ceremonial Buddhist bells from which Crown is inspired is the the vast bell at the Dazhong Monastery in Beijing: it is covered in the names of Buddha, which are metaphorically ‘recited’ every time the bell is rung. The Chinese bell weighs about 46 tons and stands 5.5 metres high, and was cast in 1420.

The bell is part of The London Bell Foundry's initiative to re-vitalise bellmaking in the UK, working with artists to demonstrate bells and bellmaking as a viable art form. The first bell was with Grayson Perry, whose generosity is now supporting the revival of bell casting.

In August 2024, Factum Arte recorded an iconic Japanese kabuto (samurai helmet), housed at the Royal Armoury in Madrid. This helmet was part of a diplomatic gift to King Philip II from the 1584 Tenshō Embassy and was badly damaged in a fire in 1884. Only the metal parts survived.

As part of a collaboration between Patrimonio Nacional and Ubisoft for the videogame Assassin's Creed Shadows, Factum Arte carried out a digital restoration to recreate how the kabuto might have looked when it was given to Philip II. Over the course of several months, using the few remaining visual records (such as a coloured drawing) and contemporary references from the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573-1603), Factum Arte physically recreated the kabuto, reintegrating missing elements such as the eyes, forehead, hair and the lacquer colouring.

The reconstructed kabuto is on display at the Galería de las Colecciones Reales in Madrid until April 6, 2025, after which it will join the collection of the Royal Armoury when it reopens this summer.

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A new set of works for Mat Collishaw has been a challenge. The AI-generated images in the Alluvion, inspired by 17th-century Dutch still life paintings, required a level of complexity that was difficult to transform into a Jacquard-woven textile.

Marcos Ludueña Segre, who has been working on the weave structures with Factum Arte since we started making tapestries in 2007, has achieved a remarkable result. Like the best tapestries, the image works from a distance and continues to hold your attention and transform as you get close to the surface.

The works were on show in his exhibition 'Vivisystem' at Galería Hilario Galguera (until 10 May 2025). The solo exhibition explored the term coined by Kevin Kelly 'to describe the phenomenon where machines increasingly mimic biological patterns, while human thought processes become more mechanised, creating a complex feedback loop'.