Cristina Iglesias

Cristina Iglesias: Metonymy
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
5 February – 13 May 2013

Museo Reina Sofía presents the largest retrospective to date, in Spain and abroad, on Cristina Iglesias (San Sebastian, 1956). Although an exhibition on her work was held at Palacio de Velázquez in 1998, this anthology includes more than fifty works and examines the broad production of the artist, from her beginnings in the mid-eighties to present days. Cristina Iglesias: Metonymy will be a unique occasion to go deep into the work of some of the Spanish creators with the widest international recognition and acquaint with the fundamental contribution that she has done to sculpture, both public and private.
Lynne Cooke, curator of the show and thorough connoisseur on her work, will make the most of the possibilities of the Sabatini building, playing with light, space, and architecture. Most windows in the galleries A1 will be opened in order to let natural light in and situate the visitor in the space. On the other hand and in order to establish a relationship between the inside and the outside of the building, the doors communicating with the garden in Sabatini will remain open, thus maintaining a fluid path through the artist’s pieces located in this space.
Approximately thirty sculptures will be on display. Made in a wide range of materials (bronze, iron, cement, wood, resin, glass, concrete…), some are more than nine meters long. One part of the exhibition will be dedicated to her well-known Celosías, and another to her Corredores suspendidos (“Suspended Corridors”), through which visitor could wander around free-standing pavilions and labyrinths. Also, two of her large pasillos vegetales (“vegetation room”), as well as her earliest sculptures, made during the eighties and nineties, will be exhibited. These pieces, of more reduced dimensions, show a characteristic mixture of materials such as alabaster, tapestry, glass, resin or aluminium. Last, the recent series titled Pozo, in which water is one more sculptural element, will be on display in the garden.
Complementing this, the retrospective will also present a comprehensive over-view of her silk-screen works on both copper and cloth, whose illusionism opens into fantastical spaces at once related to, yet very different from, those limned in her monumental sculptures. Besides, some of her public pieces will be referenced by means of her video series, the Guided Tours.