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CRISTINA IGLESIAS: INTERSPACES
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centrobotin.org Cover: Cristina Iglesias. Pabellón Suspendido III (Los sueños) / Suspended Pavillion III (The dreams), 2011-2016. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.
Francisco Gutiérrez Cossío is one of the most important artists to have come from Spain. In Portrait of My Mother, painted in 1942, he captures the serene and kind spirit of the character in an image that, despite the strict construction in various planes, favours curved lines that soften the contours. Here Cossío also used glazes and sprinkled the surface of the canvas with white dots to create the characteristic atmosphere of his paintings. In The Mask Maker José Gutiérrez Solana painted the portrait of his friend Emeterio in his workshop in Las Vistillas in Madrid. The artist captures his friend’s personality in a symmetric composition, with wellbalanced spaces. The work comes from his late production and, notwithstanding the overall blackness, it is a colourful painting endowed with an atmosphere all of its own.
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Daniel Vázquez Díaz, Mujer de rojo, C.1931.
Francis Bacon, Self Portrait with Injured Eye, 1972
Essence and expression are the two keynotes defining this collection of twentieth-century masterpieces, which its owner, Jaime Botín, has generously deposited at Centro Botín for its per manent display.
All these works share three common features that define and personalise the group: maximum expression through colour and light; the use of the figure as a common means of communication; and, finally, portraiture, the true essence of the selection.
These eight works of undisputed visual quality are by renowned, prestigious artists: Francis Bacon, Juan Gris, Francisco Gutiérrez Cossío, José Gutiérrez Solana, Henri Matisse, Isidre Nonell, Joaquín Sorolla and Daniel Vázquez Díaz. They were all produced in the early twentieth century at the height of the avant-gardes, a complex period that saw a break from tradition and the rise of a wealth of overlapping art istic and aesthetic movements.
Self Portrait with Injured Eye was painted by Francis Bacon in 1972, a few months after the suicide of his model and lover, George Dyer. The painting expresses Bacon’s solitude, bereavement and his deep sorrow following his loss, while at once capturing his self-destructive personality through a disquieting, violent image with geometric forms that decompose his face and produce a highly dynamic effect.
EXHIBITIONS
Juan Gris painted Harlequin in 1918, at the height of his creative powers, synthesising the forms to a very few elements and reducing the motifs in a simple composition that develops and presents the human figure through overlapping planes. He also uses the character to emphasise colour which he always sets off with blue.
In Spanish Woman, Henri Matisse recalls his journey to Spain in 1911 to visit the Prado Museum and to see Andalucía, from where he returned to France with luggage full of brocades and mantillas and a power ful new light in his palette, that would be materialised in clean, open colours, which he does not mix with chiaroscuros, thus translating into a lighter and more subtle, more harmonious style. Isidre Nonell painted this Half-body Figure in 1907, at a time when he abandoned his portraits of gypsy women, the main characters in his works until then, and started to paint more serene, collected and melancholic white-faced women. He
Joaquín Sorolla, Al baño. Valencia, 1908.
also opted for colour as the sole element used to model the figure, superposing whites and blues to contrast with the black hair of his models. To The Water by Joaquín Sorolla is a work of great sensibility and refinement which was painted in the summer of 1908 on the beach of Valencia. Especially worth underscoring is the delicate use of light and his restrained palette, rendered with thick brushstrokes and bright contrasts. Daniel Vázquez Díaz is one of portraiture’s greatest exponents. Woman in Red was painted in 1931, after the artist settled in Madrid. Particularly notable is the expression and emotion on the face of the character and the essence as a reflection of a spirit that transcends expression itself. A sombre and nostalgic air hovers over all these paintings, as if shrouded in a great transparent mantle of melancholy. María José Salazar
MORE INFORMATION ON THE ACTIVITIES BROCHURE AND AT WWW.CENTROBOTIN.ORG
CRISTINA IGLESIAS: INTERSPACES
THE RECONFIGURED LANDSCAPE
6 OCTOBER 3 MARCH GALLERY 2 Curator Vicente Todolí
Supported by:
23 JUNE, 2018 13 JANUARY, 2019 GALLERY 1 Curator: Benjamin Weil
Leonor Antunes’s Random Intersection #14 is part of an ongoing series of hanging works, whose design refers directly to horse bridles. She then connects her assemblage to the exhibition space by way of a network of hemp ropes, creating a kind of ghostly presence in the space, in contrast with the density of the surrounding architecture. Core to Tacita Dean’s film is her epistolary exchange with British author J.G. Ballard about the curious similarities between a short story he published in 1960 and Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s famed work of Land Art, in the Great Salt Lake (Utah). The film features saline landscapes of North America and a voiceover culled from various texts by Smithson and Ballard. Working with an oceanographer, Irene Kopelman has researched the various systems used to measure the colour and degree of transparency of bodies of water since the nineteenth century.
Habitación vegetal III (Vegetation Room III), 2005. Bronze powder, resin and fiberglass. Photo: Attilio Maranzano
wooden screens from Arab architecture that allow one to see without being seen. The light, when crossing through these constructions, casts shadows of the literary texts woven into the pieces.
Corredor Suspendido I (Suspended Corridor I), 2006. Braided wire, steel cables and shadow. 925 x 795 cm. Photo: Attilio Maranzano
Curated by Vicente Todolí, President of Fundación Botín’s Visual Arts Advisory Committee, the exhibition CRISTINA IGLESIAS: INTERSPACES provides audiences with a rare opportunity to overview the output of one of Spain’s most internationally celebrated artists, including her most recent work. Over the course of her career, Cristina Iglesias (San Sebastián, November 1956) has forged a unique sculptural vocabulary, creating immersive and experiential envir onments that combine concepts such as space and time, the visible and the hidden, with poetic and philosophical references, illusionism, metaphor and theatricality. A visit to the exhibition begins with Desde lo subterráneo (From the Underground), a
sculptural intervention with four wells and a pond situated in Pereda Gardens, outside the art centre, and then continues inside the exhibition hall with a selection of 21 monumental works created by the artist between 1992 and 2018. Throughout the show, visitors can explore the “imagined places” and the “profound sensorial landscapes” which the artist has created in her signature suspended latticework, rooms, corridors and pavilions as well as in her more recent works experimenting with new textures and materials. The tension between the visible and the invisible underpins her well-known latticeworks like Celosía XI (Jalousie XI), 2006, and Impressions d´Afrique II (Impressions of Africa II), 2002, which emulate the
At the same time, the large-scale installation Corredor suspendido I (Suspended Corridor I), 2006, invites spectators to enter into magical and surprising places through paths of reflections and shadows created by texts by J. G. Ballard infused in the piece, when light shines on them. At one end of the exhibition hall Pasaje I (Passage I), 2002, a nine by four metre work woven with esparto that transforms the architectural space, dialogues with the Jardines de Pereda outside. The show also invites visitors to discover another profound landscape, Habitación vegetal III (Vegetation Room III), 2005, a natural grotto of exuberant vegetation carved in resin, bronze powder and fibreglass. As Michael Newman claims in the book accompanying the exhibition, grottos are “spaces of transformation linked with the thresholds of life and death, and nature and culture”.
Visitors can also see a series of works in which the artist makes use of reflecting surfaces like Habitación Acero Inoxidable (Stainless steel Room), 1996, Pabellón de cristal (Crystal Pavillion I), 2014, and even her large silkscreen prints (polytychs and triptychs), which play with the illusion of showing us real places using miniature scale models. Finally, CRISTINA IGLESIAS: INTERSPACES premieres Growth I, made by the artist in 2018. This hollow, cylindrical work is composed by a rhizomatic growth of pseudo-natural forms that enclose crystalized masses of colour. The light, when cutting through this surface, projects the colour of the glass and the gaps between the roots into the centre of the space. A unique chance to follow the changing sculptural language of Cristina Iglesias, winner of Spain’s National Visual Arts Prize, over the last two decades and her ongoing examination of sculpture and its relationship with space.
MORE INFORMATION ON THE ACTIVITIES BROCHURE AND AT WWW.CENTROBOTIN.ORG
Tacita Dean, JG (frame of the film), 2013
Depicting landscapes, whether realistic or fantasized, has been core to the practice of visual arts for centuries. Since the late nineteenth century, artists have taken new approaches to generating art forms that reflect the acceleration and the complexification of the world that surrounds them. From Impressionism to subsequent movements and then to abstraction, the past 150 years has been informed by experimentation and formal breakthroughs that rendered the profound shifts brought about by new technologies and the rise of new social structures and new utopias. Art in the twenty-first century is rooted in the same concerns, reflecting a world that has become more chaotic and complex, as our realm becomes more multi-layered and globalized. The idea of landscape is the common thread running through The Reconfigured Landscape, whether addressed in a literal or in a more abstract or esoteric fashion.
A landscape that is re-engineered and rethought rather than just depicted: a site to watch or to experience within the space of the exhibition, in itself a landscape of sorts. Drawn from the collection of Fundación Botín, this selection of works includes painting, drawing, sculpture, video, as well as multimedia installations, a form that perhaps epitomizes the forefront of artistic research over the past few decades. It features works by Leonor Antunes, Miroslav Balka, Lothar Baumgarten, Jacobo Castellano, Tacita Dean, Fernanda Fragateiro, Nuria Fuster, Joan Jonas, Irene Kopelman, Sol LeWitt, Julie Mehretu, João Onofre, Sara Ramo, Ignacio Uriarte, and Oriol Vilanova. The large-scale, intricate and multilayered compositions of Julie Mehretu often feature architectural details; they depict a world in a state of chaos, wherein antagonisms and conflicts of all kinds seem to dominate.
Joan Jonas uses wall painting to create an immersive environment that evokes a forest inhabited by birds, and stages a two-channel video performance that blends references to her extensive travel around the world with her exploration of the rural landscapes of Cantabria. From 1977 to 1986, Lothar Baumgarten explored remote areas of South America. His photographs reflect on how Western fantasies of paradise and the lifestyle of autochthonous tribes contrast heavily with the systematic destruction of their habitat by international conglomerates. The wall painting lists the names of some of those tribes and of the territories they still occupy. Oriol Vilanova creates a meta-landscape out of a collection of 700 postcards of cities at night, pondering the manner in which the landscape is often reduced to a tourist cliché.
Leonor Antunes, Random intersection #14 (detail), 2017.
The floor sculpture Intersection of Fernanda Fragateiro is a replica of a duckboard pathway she encountered while scouting the grounds of Ciudad Abierta, a utopian architectural experiment carried out in central Chile. Nuria Fuster stages an effigy of Don Quixote to imbue her gathering of found objects with a theatrical plot, while at once giving this installation a landscape-like dimen sion. A sheet of iron serves as a relief, as does a vacuum cleaner, which blows air into the blades of an otherwise idle industrial fan that evokes the windmills in Miguel de Cervantes’s famous epic novel.
MORE INFORMATION ON THE ACTIVITIES BROCHURE AND AT WWW.CENTROBOTIN.ORG