Among contemporary artists, sculptor Cristina Iglesias has become quite a presence on the international scene.
She has had more than 80 group and solo exhibitions in fewer than 15 years, and though she still is only 40 — her 41st birthday will occur later this month — she already has represented Spain at the world’s oldest exposition for new art, the Venice Biennale, and has made her New York debut at no less than the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
That show, in turn, traveled to the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where it now completes a circle that began nearly a decade ago, when Iglesias’ first representation in the United States was here, in a 1988 group exhibition at the Donald Young Gallery.
Passages that enclose time and engage memory are also important to Iglesias’ work, for she often conceives an exhibition as if it were a circle, leading viewers from piece to piece until an end that is reminiscent of the show’s beginning. This she does with sculptures of cast aluminum, iron, concrete, glass, alabaster and wood that have more in common with architecture than objects situated in a space to encourage appreciation of formal qualities.
“I think I always have been obsessed by walls, constructing walls,” says Iglesias. “So already when I was in art school — first in Barcelona, then in London — I was doing ceramic pieces that you might relate to my work of the present.
“I was attracted to architecture but at the same time was conscious that my interests were more about the idea of it. I never wanted to do a building. Architectural settings were only a device. I am interested in making constructions that take you somewhere else.”
On the simplest level, Iglesias fulfills this by creating tiny models from cardboard, tape and pins. It’s an intimate activity she relates to drawing. However, she photographs the models, radically enlarges the images and destroys the originals. All that remains are illusions of places. They look like ruins with spatial and ornamental ambiguities.
Iglesias likes ambiguities, particularly of the psychological variety. In her work they become as important as the objects themselves. So, quite often, one of her pieces stands in for something larger but absent.
A suspended ceiling, rough and tilted, suggests, for example, an entire room. Here the relation of the ceiling to the viewer’s body supersedes scrutiny, for Iglesias’ work makes a claim on more than one kind of awareness. The ceiling gives the body a sense of space; the mind then encloses the space with walls not otherwise present.
When she actually does create rooms, the corners of her works do not perfectly conform to those of the spaces Iglesias has designed to present them. The current exhibition has two such rooms partially lined by aluminum bas reliefs of eucalyptus plants and a forest of bamboo. The pieces are at once evocations of nature and fences that block corners and the viewer’s perception of what they might hold.
“I think what is not there or what is in between (the construction and the wall) is also part of the work,” Iglesias says. “The experience is of the pieces in the spaces and the void that is around or behind them. The way I let you come into the space but not let you see what’s behind, whether it opens to infinity or is closed off — these are important elements.
“There is also a relationship between the pieces that has to do with how you encounter them. First you enter the aluminum room with the eucalyptus leaves, then you pass through two other spaces before entering the second aluminum room with the bamboo forest. This gives a sense of deja vu, but when you’re in the second room you realize it’s different. The first piece affects your perception of the second; the second affects your memory of the first. I like to work on those aspects. I’m very sensitive to them when I’m installing.”
Viewers have been less sensitive, perhaps because Iglesias’ brute materials and her unaffected handling of them have suggested her works grow from the purity and reductiveness of Minimalist sculpture. This is a mistake often made in haste. Her strategies go beyond the formal aspects of individual pieces and her intent is to take in more and more associations rather than to drive them out.
Not a single one of Iglesias’ works has been “about” its own materials. And never did she consider wood or concrete or glass an unusual material for a woman sculptor. She began to use them simply because they were used in architecture and she wanted to make architectural constructions.
Iglesias says: “The wall in my work is not a reference to (Minimalist sculptor Richard) Serra. It’s a very natural reference to a wall. And my suggestion of other spaces departs from that. It has nothing to do with Minimalism.
“There is sometimes denial in the work, like the idea of creating a fence to conceal something. The discomfort it causes is psychological. But at the same time the work (borders on) comfort and beauty. So I think maybe the discomfort lies in that ambiguity, not in something precise; it’s in the interval between the one thing and the other, something you cannot quite hold onto.”
Iglesias’ gently curved shelters of iron and alabaster are, for example, akin to the metal-and-glass canopies at the entrances to grand European hotels and apartment buildings around the turn of the century. But, again, she takes the reference somewhere else. The shelters don’t have a function. The space beneath them is closed. So, to Iglesias’ way of thinking, the denial of a passage becomes part of the work, causing discomfort in the clash between the beauty of the piece and it’s capacity to unsettle.
The alabaster panels do, however, allow the passage of light, which may be a recollection of the sun-shot sea Iglesias and her five siblings grew up near, when they were children in San Sebastian, a small city in the north of Spain. It’s a city strongly related to the country. It’s also probably a motivator for her references to nature in works that incorporate tapestries.
“I have made no more than five or six tapestry pieces,” Iglesias says, “and they are involved with the same issues as the rest of my work. The reference in each tapestry is to the exterior world, the outside, and that connects to suggestions or implications of nature. This is a psychological thread more than any more formal or direct link, but I see it (tying together) everything I create.
“It’s an idea about nature. Not nature with a capital “N” because I am more personal (in my approach). Yet at the same time I can’t tell you the tapestries remind me of the garden of my grandmother. That’s not it. They’re more generic. The idea of being open to a garden has so many different connotations, and those are the psychological connotations that I work.
“Each piece takes in not only the image that appears in the piece but also every state it makes you think of. So it carries the sense of a garden and a jungle, a place both tame and wild at the same time. It implies something that is present only through suggestion. Many times such places are impossible in reality. But they are places you may have dreamed.”
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Organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, “Cristina Iglesias” will continue at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., through Dec. 21.
