MADRID.- The artist Txomin Badiola (Bilbao, 1957) is the subject of a wide-ranging retrospective at the Palacio de Velázquez. It includes a selection of his production of photographic works, drawings, sculptures and multimedia installations from the 1980s to the present day.

The show is the result of a dialogue between Badiola and both João Fernandes and various artists in his milieu, since, to use his own words, “the process of conception of an exhibition of my work cannot be a simple development of conceptual order leading to a form; it must rather be the process itself that is constituted as a form per se, a form that leads to another.” Badiola has therefore invited seven artists who are close to him – Ana Laura Aláez, Ángel Bados, Jon Mikel Euba, Pello Irazu, Asier Mendizabal, Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego –to select ten of his works each and make recordings of the meetings where they explain their choices. Rather than interviewing them himself, Badiola maintains a decentralized position in this process by having younger artists act as the interlocutors. The result will be a newly produced audiovisual piece whose content will condition the material, spatial, temporal and textual relations of the exhibition.

Txomin Badiola is a key figure in what has been termed “New Basque sculpture”, a trend counterposed to the neo-Expressionist movements of the eighties in Spain. Together with Ángel Bados, Pello Irazu, Juan Luis Moraza and María Luisa Fernández, Badiola worked on various projects that used the questioning of formalist concepts like representation or originality to convert sculpture into object.