Cristina Iglesias

She studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London between 1979 and 1982, exhibiting for the first time in the British capital the same year she completed her degree. Cristina Iglesias reflects, like few Spanish artists, the paradigm of the internationalization of Spanish visual arts in the eighties. Thus, she has exhibited in prestigious museums and foundations, both in Europe and in the United States. Spanish representative, along with Antoni Tàpies, at the 45th edition of the Venice Biennale (1993).

Her sculptures, over two decades, have been defining certain motifs and themes that constitute authentic threads running through her work. First, sculpture understood, in parallel, as an autonomous construction that creates its own space and as a transformer of the surrounding space. This places the viewer halfway between the work as an object and as an installation in a determined space, and forces them to adopt an active attitude of visual contemplation and physical circulation.

Second, that conception of sculpture as a "skin" that envelops and/or separates two distinct realities: interior-exterior, structural-decorative, organic-mineral, object-context... are some of the dialectics that Cristina Iglesias masterfully articulates with her plastic research.

Finally, the structural importance of light, of chiaroscuro, as indispensable elements for conferring on her pieces that quality of accessible places, of transit zones, or rather of a limit that signals to the viewer a continuity beyond the sculpture object, a continuity that cannot be realized physically, in a play of scenographic character: Behind the illusion of the set there exists only emptiness.

The work in the Collection is an exceptional piece in her trajectory. The twenty parts (of cast aluminum) of which it is composed can be deployed or folded back in a wide range of possibilities and represent a magnificent example of another of the most characteristic features of her poetics: the use of the walls of the room where the work is installed. Thus, the interior-exterior dialectic is expanded upon, and that expansion of the univocal objectuality traditionally associated with sculpture becomes even more complex and rich. We are undoubtedly before a very important work by one of the artists with the greatest international projection of her generation.

Text provided by the Mediterranean Foundation. Author: J. B. Peiró.