Patricia Gadea was a painter associated with the Madrid cultural scene known as La Movida. Her practice, from painting and collage to performance, revealed the contradictions embodied in the process of cultural modernization following the end of the Franco dictatorship in Spain (1975).
P. Gadea first encountered the visual arts while studying at the Colegio Estilo in Madrid. In 1977–1978 she took classes in drawing at the Academia Artium Peña. There she met Juan Ugalde (1958–), who became her life partner. A year later they both enrolled in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, also in Madrid.
She first showed her work in 1979 at the Academia, in a group exhibition with other artists she considered her comrades, Comida-homenaje a Napoleón [Meal – Homage to Napoleon], for which the participants provided several illustrated posters. This spontaneous intervention challenged the academic character of an institution that had remained impervious to the international currents traversing the art world. She and J. Ugalde began visiting European capitals to explore countercultural movements such as punk.
Her career took off rapidly. In 1985, along with other artists, she led the occupation of an underground passage in Madrid, which, for several hours, was transformed into an art gallery they called “Mary Boom”, a reference to the well-known Mary Boon gallery in New York. In 1986 she received a Fulbright grant to study in New York, where she moved with J. Ugalde. She met the poet and artist Dionisio Cañas (1949–), with whom they began to hang out at McCarthy’s Bar, which she depicted in an eponymous painting (1987). During those years she did performances and interventions with D. Cañas at Baruch College (1987) and the Fashion Moda Gallery (1988). In 1987, she was selected to show at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London.

In 1989, P. Gadea, D. Cañas and J. Ugalde returned to Madrid, where they founded the political Pop art group Estrujenbank together with the artist Mariano Lozano (1942–2021). The group launched an exhibition space with the same name, which was to play a significant role in the city’s alternative art scene.

The 1990s represented an inflexion point in her trajectory. The Estrujenbank was dissolved, and she separated from J. Ugalde. The decade was marked by her series Circo [Circus], a painterly critique of the Spanish political landscape and its conception of freedom in terms of markets and spectacles. In 1994 she took part in the exhibition Cocido y crudo [The Raw and the Cooked] at the Museo Reina Sofía, considered a great success. Nevertheless, at the end of the decade she abandoned her practice of art and signed into a drug rehabilitation centre.

She was found dead in her apartment in 2006. J. Ugalde took the responsibility for locating and rescuing her artworks, which had been scattered across the country and considered lost. She was featured at a solo show at the Museo Reina Sofía in 2014–2015. Her work now resides in that museum’s collections, and at Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Fundación La Caixa.