PRESENTATION: June Crespo-Vascular

June Crespo’s sculptural practice forges a transformative dialogue with the concepts that have marked Basque art in recent decades, yet it also addresses radically contemporary topics like feminist sensibility and awareness of the crisis in natural ecosystems caused by the industrialized world. In her works she often integrates recognizable parts of receptacles or building structures like barrels, cement formwork, or iron pieces secured by straps, which are joined in Vascular by rescaled flower stems and parts arranged in intensely dynamic sets.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Archive

June Crespo’s solo exhibition “Vascular” brings together a selection of recent works, as well as a large-scale sculptural assemblage designed specifically for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao exhibition space. Both spatially and conceptually, this presentation is planned as a turning point in the exhibitions Crespo has held to date. June Crespo’s sculptural practice is voluntarily situated at the intersection of multiple pathways and contemporary lines of inquiry. On the one hand, she forges a transformative dialogue with the concepts that have characterized Basque art in recent decades, “mobile pairs” like abstraction and gesture, the tragic and the opaque, and lightness and strangeness. She also addresses issues whose urgency was missing from major debates until relatively recently, particularly regarding feminist sensibility and awareness of the devastation that modern lifestyles have wrought on the natural environment, which is now fully subjugated to industrial and post-industrial production and reproduction cycles, as well as the abrasions of the Anthropocene. In Crespo’s work, materials appear as agents of complex operations, each affecting one another in her assemblages. This often means recognizable parts of receptacles or building structures, elements that are reminiscent of the world of industrial functionality like barrels, cement formwork, or iron pieces secured by straps. In the new set of works lending their name to the exhibition, Vascular, flower stems and parts, rescaled and arranged in sets, appear suspended, boasting intense dynamism. Even though the point of departure of Crespo’s sculpture is often the proportions of human bodies like height, extension, and relation with the ground, her exhibition for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao gallery 105 resituates the scale of her previous works and takes it to a new level of metamorphosis. Crespo gives her materials, a vivid, empathetic nature, a gesturality that lies at the foundation of this exhibition project, that offers a perspective on the artist’s work, while also inviting the public to explore a totally new scale in her production. Stockpiling and amalgamating a motley assortment of elements—molds taken from plants, found clothing or fabrics, building materials like bricks or blocks, rods, or press—June Crespo’s sculptures underscore the stark contrast of the living or even damaged material with the structural elements which fence in and channel our existence in the guise of conduits, veneers, molds, or formwork. Stems, or pieces of fabric or paper are attached to them or are trapped in their joints. Coupled by turnbuckles or simply propped against each other, these elements interrogate one another. Along with a selection of around thirty works from the past seven years, the exhibition is arranged around new production in which forms, gestures, and questions that recur in many of Crespo’s series converge. Examples of this include the sculptural or even architectural use of photographic images, turned into large prints on the floor, and the presentation of industrially-manufactured supports, like desks or elevator platforms, not in an autonomous but in a functional role for a sculptural set, both of them propping up the proliferation of tubular and cylindrical plant forms in space. The collision of these gestures and questions enables new material and formal inquiries to be made and an enormous space to be tackled, drawing multiple lines of interaction. Not only does “Vascular” seek to reveal the internal communication within each Crespo piece, stressing the liquid, fluid world of mixes, melted substances, and washes, but the exhibition also suggests transmissions among all the works included in the project, which serve as connecting vessels and capillary networks. Thus, a project emerges in which the artist reconsiders her own relationship with space as she recalibrates her work on a new scale. The new installation specifically conceived and produced for this show and bearing the same title is presented alongside other sculptural series, tracing a possible journey through the artist’s career. The criteria for grouping the pieces together in the exhibition was not chronological, nominal, or numerical but instead based on affinity, the shared intensity and kinship of the works in space. Thus, we find triangulations between the new series “Vascular” (2024) and “VSCHC “(2023), “Veils” (2022), “Acts of Pulse” (2022), “Dividual” (2022), and “Voy, sí “(2020), among others. And they go so far as to blur the individual beginning of each work, so there is also a vascularity that transcends the morphological and affects the structural levels of her sculptural practice

Photo: June Crespo, Vascular (5), 2024, Curved checker steel plate and rugs, 150 × 300 × 293 cm, Courtesy the artist, © June Crespo, Bilbao, 2024, Image © FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa. Photo Erika Barahona Ede

Info: Curator: Manuel Cirauqui, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Abando, Bilbo, Bizkaia, Spain, Duration: 1/3-6/9/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/