Asier Mendizabal

Opening: 24 January 2007

A member of the latest generation of Basque artists, Asier Mendizabal (Ordizia, Gipuzkoa province, 1973) produces sculptures and installations which share a similar concern: the question for signs and symbols enabling us to go beyond ideas about geographic or cultural roots in constructing the identities of groups and individuals. Hence, the idea of generation or a emotional relationship to events or aesthetic production lines (music) confirm areas of identification in which we find both the importance of hard rock and punk and a critical gaze at models for co-existence proposed by modernity, particularly as regards architecture, the working world and the supposed emancipations that history has produced. In his work, Mendizabal uses images from different sub-cultures, from graphic signs to the apparently inalterable neutrality of natural landscapes and their encounters with the artificiality of rural development.

This exhibition presents a monographic vision of Mendizabal’s work, focusing on certain works that explore the tension between urban environments that contain and generate collective consciousness on one hand, and semi-rural landscapes that shape certain kinds of associations (neighbourhoods, sympathies, groups, etc.) that are equally important on the other. The cinema plays a leading role in these works, providing the technique by which to generate liberating collective imageries. The exhibition will also include a work produced specifically for the occasion.

Curator: Peio Aguirre Produced by: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)

Asier Mendizabal
Kurator: Peio Aguirre