PRESENTATION: Cristina Iglesias
Throughout her career, Cristina Iglesias has defined a unique sculptural vocabulary, building immersive and experiential environments that reference and unite architecture, literature and culturally site-specific influences. Through a language of constructed and natural forms rendered in various materials and ranging from suspended pavilions, latticed panels, passageways, and mazes, to walls imbued with texts and structural and vegetative forms, she poetically redefines space by confounding interior and exterior, organic and artifice.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Skulpturenhalle Archive
Cristina Iglesias’ works break with the traditional notion of sculpture as a freestanding figure or fixed three-dimensional object in that her constructions lean heavily on their surroundings in the architectonic space and the natural environment, with the passage replacing the enclosure, and the integration of fictitious strata and fluid elements. The earliest work in her solo exhibition, the 1991 wall object “Untitled (Berlin II)”, already reveals some of the ideas that Iglesias would continue to pursue in her later work. The work is neither a picture nor a wall relief: it is more like the kind of canopy one might see over a doorway. This effect is heightened by the slightly asymmetrical metal structure that suggests an independent spatial entity. The blue glass surface that sweeps forward from the wall overlays a fabric decorated with motifs from nature, redolent of 18th Century decorative wall coverings. The pattern can only be seen on stepping under the canopy and looking up. In keeping with its application, the fabric is spanned on the wall, suggesting an interior space, while the motifs evoke a distant pastoral life, set behind glass to indicate that it is a quote. The separation of canopy and wall-covering into two distinct areas places the viewer in an indeterminate situation between interior and exterior. This ambiguity is also one of the themes in “Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias”, consisting of a series of free-standing, semi-transparent terracotta screens. These celosias, as they are called in Spain, were adopted into Spanish architecture through the influence of the Moorish style, providing a latticed structure that filters the glaring sunlight to create a crepuscular atmosphere. It also adds the potential for ornamentation, which Iglesias has made use of here not only to divide the screens into compartments with a square grid, but also to integrate letters of the alphabet so subtly into the horizontal, vertical and diagonal partitioning that they are not immediately obvious to the eye. We get the impression that they could be grouped together to form a text, in the double sense of the word which also means woven together from individual strands. The text, to which the title of this work refers, is by the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta, who travelled throughout South America in the sixteenth century and whose writings focus on the connection between the Old and New Worlds. In contrast to this labyrinthine grouping of regular elements, the work “Growth” consists of twisted walls that appear to have been cast up like waves from the depths, spiralling around an empty interior into which we can walk. Instead of geometric order, we find the walls filled with organic elements – branches, leaves, roots. These are not blossoming trees or plants, nor even images of them; they are casts of parts of plants, reminiscent of fossils, evoking the past. Their transformation into aluminium, and in other works into resin, lends the plants an artificiality that makes them like some fictitious image of nature. The creation of these works involves a combination of documentation and imagination, as well as practical preparations in the form of photography and drawing. First of all, Iglesias sketches the basic idea for the work. She then documents individual aspects photographically. The sketches and photos help her to imagine and arrange the space, structure and light. She then makes ephemeral models of cardboard and other materials.
Photo: Cristina Iglesias, Pabellón de Cristal, 2014, Glass, metal, polyester resin, iron powder, water, hydraulic mechanism, 310 x 400 x 468 cm, Photo: Dejan Sarić, © Cristina Iglesias, Courtesy the artist and Skulpturenhalle
Info: Curator: Dieter Schwarz, Skulpturenhalle, Lindenweg, Junction Berger Weg (Near Raketenstation), Neuss/Holzheim, Germany, Duration: 3/9-12/12/2021, Days & Hours: Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://thomas-schuette-stiftung.de
