Three decades of work by one of the Basque artists with the greatest international projection have been displayed since yesterday in the rooms of the Reina Sofía Museum, building almost a new work. The installations, photos, drawings, sculptures and videos of Ibon Aranberri (Deba, Gipuzkoa, 1969) accumulate and overlap, constructing a multiple image, although presided over by powerful pieces such as the installation Hydraulic Politics, in which a hundred photos of large Dams and reservoirs, framed and turned into paintings, are stacked on a wall as if it were an artist's workshop. But showing, instead of the usual portraits and still lifes, a strange and repeated sea of water, earth and concrete.
It is a good example of Aranberri's look at the landscape and its transformations, at the infrastructures and the post-industrial world, at the territory as a place for the projection of ideology and at the questioning of the material legacy of modernity and the idea of progress. At the same time recovering – as in Compendium, old work tools in the field lent by neighbors of a Cantabrian village and arranged on a white sheet – previous ways of life.
It is Ibon Aranberri. Partial view, which although it covers three decades is not considered a retrospective, says Beatriz Herráez, curator of the exhibition together with the previous director of the Reina Sofía, Manuel Borja-Villel and herself director of the Artium, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country , in Vitoria. This exhibition will also be seen there starting in April, which, she says, shows how the artist is affected by “ideas such as those of fragility or cracks.”
For Borja-Villel, Aranberri takes “two traditions, that of the landscape and the relationship with nature, that of hikers, and the industrial one, and coming from a world that is that of the so-called, in quotes, Basque sculpture. he turns it around in a very interesting way, questioning the devices. In each room of the exhibition, one thing leads to another. It has been a work of movement, of not pigeonholing and making things unfold in others, but without completely losing the meaning and with some ironic wink."
