Beyond Limits

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Lot 6
  • 6

Cristina Iglesias

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Description

  • Cristina Iglesias
  • Habitación Vegetal XV (doble pasaje) (Plant Room XV (Double Passage))
  • bronze powder, polyester resin, fibre glass and stainless steel
  • 285 by 570 by 470cm.
  • 112 by 224 1/2 by 185 in.

Provenance

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 2008

Catalogue Note

Cristina Iglesias is regarded as one of Spain’s most important working artists and has throughout her career explored and enriched the vocabulary of contemporary sculpture. Her works have been exhibited worldwide, including at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Her reputation as a pioneer of contemporary art has won her prestigious commissions, including a work for the Basque Parliament dedicated to victims of terrorism and a commission in 2010 to create an ambitious underwater sculpture fifteen metres below sea level in the Cortez Sea near Isla Espíritu Santo.

In the early 1990s, Iglesias began her series of Espacios Vegetales. This series comprises installations which are architectural in form and contemporary in their minimalist design. However, in the interior chamber the natural organic world is reconstructed through a variety of media and visual effects. In these enclosed ‘rooms’ which re-imagine the natural environment, Iglesias creates a rich interplay between concealment and revelation, exploring the boundaries between reality and appearance.

In the case of the present work, the exterior with its stainless steel finish literally reflects its immediate surroundings; however, this appearance is deliberately deceiving as the mirror distorts the reflections and presents a contorted view of the surrounding environment. In contrast to this, the interior chamber presents what appears to be a more natural reality, revealing a myriad of delicately formed branches and leaves that recreate the living world reflected in the outer walls. In this way Iglesias’s installation interrogates pre-conceived notions of how an object relates to its space and surroundings. The viewer too must play a part as they approach the work and confront their reflection before being drawn into the work: one cannot be a passive participant in Iglesias’s fictional world.