CRISTINA IGLESIAS

The space and its elements



Cristina Iglesias in the Cristina Iglesias. Metonimia opening
at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2013. 
Photo by Joaquín Cortés / Román Lores



Under the title Cristina Iglesias. Metonymy the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía of Madrid last spring opened the largest retrospective of the artist from San Sebastian. An artist of great international recognition especially after her participation in the group exhibition The sublime void in Antwerp in 1983 alongside artists such as Gerhard Richter or Kounellis, her career has been developed in the maze of space, physical and metaphorical. Born in 1956, she said the exhibition represented a "very good experience. I always worry do a work that is sensitive to the space it occupies and the Reina is a space that looks like a big rigid monster, however , opening windows and moving walls can make it become another thing".

Metonymy is more than a game of mirrors, as its author says "metaphor is the extreme of metonymy", the space between cause and effect, playing with them, it becomes pliable dough. " One of my big concerns is to awaken the senses and give viewers a great experience " and so through thirty sculptures , some over nine meters long , made of very different materials ( bronze, iron , cement, glass , concrete ... ) experience becomes dressed in our circumstance and leads us to the question of interior and personal space and locked in our external construction , our dress for the occasion and how our adaptation is more oriented to the structure than to the space, more to the appearance than to the essence of our elements. Where do our winds run?. "There are concerns we can find in art. Today we are experiencing a very difficult time in which the metaphor may have a role and I believe in the fight to defend that art is important, that people could enter into a new experience that will make them wonder about things that take you further yourself. I do not give messages, I create places and places are very open to everyone to have an experience according to the way he or she comes". And we don’t come to the way we get out from it, which does not mean that we will apply what we’ve learned or that the questions raised in cases that go beyond aesthetics will get some effort on our part to be answered or any response out of the mould we carry for years forced by fears and interests, i.e. our own nature. And nature and our adaptation to it is also key in Cristina Iglesias's reflections on her work: "Nature and the city, nature and culture, is a central core of representation in painting and sculpture. I create fictions in which perhaps the reference to nature is on the extreme of creating fiction, recreate a subject that doesn’t exist as such in nature from lines that do exist but using it to create something else”. Something else we can see, hear and silence, or make it just a vainglory to showcase our supposed cultivation, or as a point followed by the writing of new lines where our winds blow at ease. The work of Cristina Iglesias is mainly a transformation of the inner space to open it to the world.
Cristina Iglesias. Metonimia. A selection here
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
All the comments by Cristina Iglesias taken from the press conference at the opening of Cristina Iglesias. Metonimia at Museo Reina Sofía
Photo by Joaquín Cortés / Ramón Lores
Photo and Cristina Iglesias comments courtesy of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
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