SANTANDER.- Centro Botín presents, from 6 October 2018 to 3 March 2019, the retrospective exhibition “Cristina Iglesias: Interspaces”. The show, curated by Vicente Todolí, chairman of the Artistic Committee, comprises twenty-three of the artist’s works created between 1992 and 2018 of which some are typically monumental in size.

Cristina Iglesias has close ties with Fundación Botín and its new art centre in Santander, having specifically conceived her sculptural project From the Underground, a work in stone, steel and water comprising four wells and a pond, for Centro Botín and the Pereda Gardens.

A renowned visual artist, recipient of the National Visual Arts Award in 1999, her work has been influenced by the time spent in London in the 1980s, where she came across much more all-encompassing sculpture production processes. Furthermore, it was in the United Kingdom that she began to connect not only with the “new British sculpture”, but also with the Düsseldorf school. During this discovery period she became acquainted with the work of Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson, among other artists, who she considers played a significant role during this learning phase although her work does not pertain to any particular currents or trends.

Throughout her career, Iglesias has defined a unique sculptural vocabulary, by creating immersive and experiential environments which blend architecture, literature and cultural influences specific to the location. Using a language of natural forms built of a variety of materials, she poetically redefines space by merging the interior with the exterior, the organic and the artificial, combining industrial materials with natural elements to produce new and unexpected sensorial spaces.

Giuliana Bruno, in her text “The density of surface: projections on a wall-screen” (MNCARS, catalogue 2013), writes: “the world of Cristina Iglesias is one of thresholds, suspended along the border of imaginary places. In this universe, sculptures and textures form an imaginary dialogue with architecture and the environment, thus exposing its temporality. Made with a variety of materials suggestive of a metamorphosis of vital states, these works call for fluid forms of living. Even when they appear to be trying to prevent the visitors to the museum or the gallery from physically penetrating them, they offer a form of virtual and visual access. These are doors or, better still, portals that beckon one to cross borders, including that which separates the interior from the exterior… One sets off on an introspective journey when one views this type of sculpture that does not conceive space as a mere context or architecture as a corollary. The space is the work, and one must be aware of its different planes of existence”.

“Cristina Iglesias: Interspaces” is showing a large selection of works, occupying all of the second floor of the West Wing of Centro Botín, in perfect harmony with her work in the Pereda Gardens Desde lo subterráneo.

Iglesias’ last big exhibition in Spain was at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2013, so this show at Centro Botín now provides a unique opportunity to look back at her career as well as discover her more recent works.

In this exhibition, the artist interconnects Centro Botín with its surroundings, with a continuous tension between the visible and the invisible in Iglesias’ work, and the seemingly frontier-like quality of her pieces, attempt to join spaces and open the door to invisible places.

Her pieces always endeavour to create an access to an imaginary “another place”, to a deep landscape which, can essentially be grasped by interpreting some of her more significant works in this exhibition, such as Sin título. Venecia II [Unitled, Venice II] (1993). This work, which belongs to the artist’s own collection, is a masterful synthesis of part of the codes that may be used to interpret some of the other pieces shown at Centro Botín.

The work of this artist from San Sebastián compellingly recreates the four elements of nature and shows the power of what is alive and present in the inert materials around us; in short, it connects worlds that are close in physical terms but distant in everyday life, without which human existence would not be possible.

Centro Botín shows twenty-two works in the hall and an additional one in the Pereda Gardens. All the pieces share a marked spatial character, where the artist renders a poetic view of landscape that interacts with the building designed by Renzo Piano, the perfect container for the artist’s magical doors.