A deep dive into Almodóvar through color, desire and cinematic texture.
Thursday Textures takes a deep dive into Pedro Almodóvar through Pedro Almodóvar himself. With Anthony D. along for the visual ride, we are pulling back into the filmmaker’s former Academy Museum installation — a room built around the colors, faces, desire, melodrama and emotional excess that made his cinema instantly recognizable.
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures presented Installation: Pedro Almodóvar from September 30, 2021 through December 1, 2024 in its Level 3 Rolex Gallery. Rather than simply lining up costumes and memorabilia, the museum gave Almodóvar the room itself: an immersive, multichannel media installation created by the director specifically for the museum.
Pedro Almodóvar
Color, melodrama, desire — and a filmmaker curating his own cinematic language.
The Academy Museum installation turned Almodóvar’s filmography into an immersive gallery experience built around the themes, characters and visual excess that define his work.
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Almodóvar Did Not Make a Quiet Museum Room
Quiet was never really the assignment. Almodóvar’s cinema has spent decades making color behave like emotion: reds that feel dangerous, blues that ache, interiors that look staged because the people inside them are already performing some version of themselves. The installation carried that same language into the gallery rather than reducing his work to a polite career timeline.
The Academy Museum describes the experience as an exploration of the provocative and humanistic themes at the heart of his films — particularly the dynamic women, LGBTQ+ characters, lush production design, humor, desire and emotional intensity that have run through his work since his earliest features during Spain’s post-Franco cultural explosion.
The Exhibition Let His Filmography Talk to Itself
That is what makes the installation linger even after the gallery itself has closed. Almodóvar was not being interpreted from a distance; he was helping construct the environment. Clips, imagery and sound could collide the way memories do, allowing one film to echo another and one era of his work to answer a later one.
It is also why the installation made sense inside Stories of Cinema. Almodóvar’s world has always been built from more than plot. His women, mothers, lovers, outsiders, performers and beautifully complicated disasters carry as much visual information as the rooms around them. Production design is never wallpaper. Costume is rarely just clothing. Color arrives with an opinion.
There Was Even an Almodóvar Book for the Full Obsession
The museum extended the installation into the bilingual exhibition catalogue Pedro Almodóvar: Installation / Instalación, edited with text by Jenny He and J. Raúl Guzmán. It includes a foreword by Tilda Swinton, a conversation between Almodóvar and film journalist Rachel Handler, an afterword by Agustín Almodóvar and a richly illustrated filmography.
Which feels correct. If you are going to deep-dive Almodóvar, there is no respectable reason to stop at the wall.
Our Thursday Textures clip is soundtracked by Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2026 “Never Let A Good Thing Die” — currently part of the ever-moving mix over at INYIM Radio, spinning worldwide with new music, deep cuts, throwbacks and discoveries in rotation.
The Academy Museum installation may be gone, but Almodóvar’s textures are hardly trapped in a museum. They are still there every time one of his films turns a wall, a dress, a face or a room into something emotionally louder than dialogue.
Watch Thursday Textures: Pedro Almodóvar’s Academy Museum Installation With Anthony D.
INYIM’s Thursday Textures clip revisits Pedro Almodóvar’s former Academy Museum installation with Anthony D., set to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Never Let A Good Thing Die.”
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Source: Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
