Garmendia, Maneros Zabala, Salaberria. Process and Method
31 October 2013–16 February 2014
Guggenheim Bilbao
Abandoibarra et.2
Bilbao 48001
Curated by Lucía Agirre and Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Garmendia, Maneros Zabala, Salaberria. Process and Method, an exhibition that examines the careers of three Basque creators who were born in the late 1960s and the 1970s whose practice shares a common interest in history as fodder for inquiry and revision. The show surveys the careers of these artists via their most important works, showing the mutual feedback among them, and it also displays three new works created especially for the Museum, which will become part of the Bilbao collection.
The analysis of history as a way to evidence its contradictions and ambiguities is a shared strategy in the artistic practice of Iñaki Garmendia, Erlea Maneros Zabala, and Xabier Salaberria. Beyond deconstructing the history itself, these artists more subtly and imperceptibly express a “shared sensibility,” such that the processes of re-creation, appropriation, and reinterpretation are part of their approaches to the concept of art.
We can also discern in these artists a phenomenological view of the state of matters, which is coupled with a vision that encompasses the experience of the everyday. Their avenues of inquiry, both shared and relevant, do not take shape in a uniform aesthetic expression but in vectors that make up a pluralistic web. This mesh has a substrate which sometimes has to do with territory and other times with the history of the ideas and artistic movements of the 20th century.
Throughout the third floor of the Museum, the exhibition brings together photographs, videos, engravings, drawings, watercolors, and installations created between 2001 and today, reflecting the diversity of mediums and techniques used by these contemporary artists. The works in the show come from a variety of museums, galleries, and private collectors, as well as from the artists’ own collections.
The exhibition analyzes the careers of these three artists from the Basque Country who represent three very different ways of approaching the process of revising, decontextualizing, and creating new realities based on different reference-histories that therefore prompt personal and highly unique interpretations by viewers.
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
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