Overview
Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Cristina Iglesias. One of Spain’s most renowned artists, Iglesias’ work has broadened and enriched the vocabulary of sculpture with her interest in and attention to space, architecture, materials, light, and fictional topographies with which she constructs entire environments of perception and experience. On view will be a range of new indoor and outdoor works which have diverse associations with a series of extraordinary and ambitious public projects and commissions that Iglesias has been engaged with over the past five years.
Cristina Iglesias
March 22 – April 27, 2011
Opening Reception: Tuesday, March 22, 6-8 pm
Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Cristina Iglesias which will open to the public on Tuesday, March 22nd and will be on view through Wednesday, April 27th.
One of Spain’s most renowned artists, Iglesias’ work has broadened and enriched the vocabulary of sculpture with her interest in and attention to space, architecture, materials, light, and fictional topographies with which she constructs entire environments of perception and experience.
On view will be a range of new indoor and outdoor works which have diverse associations with a series of extraordinary and ambitious public projects and commissions that Iglesias has been engaged with over the past five years.
These projects have been realized in Antwerp, Belgium; Museo del Prado, Madrid; Siena, Italy; the Basque Parliament, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; beneath the Cortes sea in the northern Mexican state of Baja California; and in the historic city of Toledo, Spain, to name a few.
On view will be Pozos I – V (Wells); Garden Piece (Moat) ; Bajo la superficie (Under the Surface); Aquarium; and a series of new silkscreens on silk. Also on view will be a film, Guided Tour III, which transports the viewer to several pieces sited in locations throughout the world and includes walkthroughs of both city and landscape.
The exteriors of the Pozos in the North Gallery consist of granite block structures which, upon approach, each contain a surprising interior core topography with a unique patina. Cast in both stainless steel and resin and bronze powder and integrating vegetative bas-relief images with water and its sound, each has a different sequence of water coursing through it. Illusory in depth, they recall motifs of fictional arcadia related to her Vegetation Passageways.
Garden Piece, similarly, is a structure which can be constructed outdoors and consists of a garden with a pavilion in its center -- a chamber in stainless steel, surrounded by a moat. While the exterior of the room reflects the surrounding garden, a labyrinthine interior landscape evokes a living organic mass of passageways, a constructed maze which, if you follow it, connects you with the opposite entrance, creating an experience of being surrounded or enclosed by the water’s flow.
The Silkscreens on view in the North Gallery Viewing Room are based on models of sculpture. Constructed from paper, cardboard, tape, and photographs and here juxtaposed with the adjacent Garden work, the underwater Baja California commission, Mexico, and with her own sculptural labyrinths, fourteen silkscreens based on photographs of sculptural sketches, enlarged and transferred onto silk, will be shown.
Aquarium III in the South Gallery is situated to the left side of a set of stairs and a ramp leading to an elevated room which could be a terrace or garden or square. Recessed below, Iglesias’ Bajo la Superficie rests, sunken into a constructed floor which simulates a piazza or courtyard and displays tiles and an undergrowth of cast foliage beneath a stream of flowing water.
In her large scale public commissions for urban spaces as well as in her domestically scaled indoor and outdoor projects Iglesias reiterates her longstanding interest in “the notion of Arcadia and the unknown, a place which is attractive but at the same time you can get lost there and never come back… [or] another notion of space – the imagination as a space. The garden of pleasure is there but at the same time, it has a dark side… The elements I play with, like visibility and invisibility… or the way a detail becomes a whole world when you get close to it and disappears at a distance.” (Art World, June/July 2009).
Over the last five years, Iglesias has dedicated herself to a number of high profile public sculpture projects. These include Diepe Fontein, 2006, a work constructed for the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, which consists of a large fountain containing a vast tidal pool whose water appears and disappears through a transversal cut or opening along the entire surface. Akin to a spring or fountain, the ebb and flow of the hour long cycle represents time and tides, coming and going, with the fountain filling to reflect the museum’s great neoclassical façade and portico, and then emptying to reveal a bed of densely woven cast eucalyptus leaves at its depth.
In 2007 Iglesias was commissioned to create a new set of doors for the entrance to architect Rafael Moneo’s extension to The Prado Museum, Madrid. The spectacular bronze doors, made of six parts, all nine meters high, including four which are timed to have a sequenced movement at particular hours of the day, creates “a passage which works with the idea of fantasy, of crossing between the street and that incredible world of imagination – it’s the threshold in between, a passage that takes you somewhere else”.
Recently, this past November, she inaugurated Estancias Sumergidas, 2010 a sculpture created off the coast of the northeastern Mexican state of Baja California near Isla Espiritu Santo which is submerged fifteen meters beneath the sea and three meters high and provides a coral reef for underwater life. Estancias Sumergidas utilizes the vocabulary of Iglesias’ Celosias (Jealousies) using screens of latticed grids that incorporate texts which both obscure and reveal an interior space.
Other important public commissions which have been completed include an homage to the victims of terrorism for the Basque Parliament, Spain, and a bronze sculptural relief fountain for a secluded courtyard of the Castello di Ama, in Siena, Italy. She is currently at work on an outdoor Garden labyrinth which will be constructed for Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil in 2012. In the Fall of 2012, another major project for the historic city of Toledo, Spain, surrounded by the Tagus River, will address the legacy of coexisting cultures there--Christian, Jewish and Muslim--as well as engage four key historic sites in its staging.
Upcoming exhibitions include a project for the 2012 Sydney Biennale and a major touring exhibition at The Reina Sofia, Madrid in January of 2013.
In addition to commissioned projects, exhibitions over the last decade have included solo shows at such institutions as Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan (2009); Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2006); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Whitechapel Gallery (2003); and Museu Serralves, Fudacao Serralves, Oporto, Portugal (2002), among others.
Please join us at the opening reception on Tuesday, March 22nd from 6-8 p.m.
Please join us at the opening reception on Tuesday, March 22nd from 6-8 p.m.
For further information, please contact Leslie Nolen at: 212 977 7160.
