I love this work since I first saw it. It's not perhaps the best, it's probably not the one that best sums up the artist's trajectory, but this is my favorite, and in his way it shows one of the artist's main aesthetic concerns: that the viewer walks into space so that he can physically live the artwork, not only at the conceptual level, but by introducing the viewer's body into the same space.
Although it is not a simple retrospective, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao this year has offered an individual exhibition that the artist assumes as his own transforming the space of the exhibition hall itself, achieving a beginning and an end, partly denying the idea of artistic trajectory or development, as if always creating scores from scratch, and yet underlining the coherence and connection between the works carried out during 30 years of development.
Following this exhibition, the artist himself said: “What has interested me from the very beginning is a little-worked idea, or at least a very strange idea in the world of sculpture, the idea of landscape. By removing things from the pedestal, the elements share your same space. So that's where a space is created. You participate in that space, the objects participate in it, and that is ideological. A landscape effect is created. But not only at the image level, but also in the way of living that environment.”
Its function is to create new spaces for the human being, as a norm that has imposed itself. Also this: emotion must be in the viewer, not at work. Look at those two beds that are not beds, you want to live there.
Pello Irazu Mendizabal (Andoain, 26 October 1963) is working hard, creating habitable spaces.
This text comes two years later, but the calamities of drunks are like this. A surprising surprise happened in San Fermín Txikito: I met Maite Ciganda Azcarate, an art restorer and friend of a friend. That night he told me that he had been arranging two figures that could be... [+]
On Monday afternoon, I had already planned two documentaries carried out in the Basque Country. I am not particularly fond of documentaries, but Zinemaldia is often a good opportunity to set aside habits and traditions. I decided on the Pello Gutierrez Peñalba Replica a week... [+]