June Crespo. Vascular
The sculptural practice of June Crespo (Pamplona, 1982) voluntarily places itself at the crossroads of multiple paths and lines of contemporary research. On the one hand, it establishes a transformative dialogue with the concepts that have marked Basque art in recent decades, "moving pairs" such as abstraction and gesture, the tragic and the opaque, lightness and strangeness. It also takes up issues whose urgency was absent from the major debates until relatively recently, particularly with regard to feminist sensibility and awareness of the devastation that the modern way of life has brought to nature, already fully subjected to the cycles of industrial and post-industrial production and reproduction. and the abrasions of the Anthropocene.
The lively and active nature of materiality has accompanied Crespo's practice to this day and is at the basis of the project of the exhibition Vascular, which is presented at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao with the idea of offering a perspective on the artist's work inviting her, at the same time, to explore dimensions hitherto unseen in her practice. By hoarding and amalgamating elements of a very diverse order—molds taken from plants, used clothes or fabrics, construction pieces, concrete casts, magazines—and taking them to drastic assemblages and alterations of scale, June Crespo's sculptures underline the strong contrast between the lived material and the structural elements that enclose and channel our existence, whether they are conduits, etc. Veneers, moulds or formwork. Stems are attached to them or textile pieces or paper are trapped in their joints, and traces of technical operations, erosion and accidents can also be read. Linked by tensors or simply resting on each other, these elements interrogate each other incessantly.
Together with a selection of works from the last seven years, the exhibition Vascular is structured around a new and extraordinary production in which forms, gestures and recurring questions converge in many of Crespo's series. Examples of this can be the sculptural or even architectural use of photographic images, converted into large floor prints; or the presentation of supports from industrial production or construction, such as work tables, stairs or lifting platforms, which serve as the basis for the proliferation of vegetable, tubular and cylindrical forms in space. Vascular not only wants to indicate the internal communication within each piece of June Crespo, but also suggests transmissions between all the works included in the project. These act as communicating vessels and capillary networks both at the level of the materials and the scarifications and marks that Crespo makes emerge on the surface of the sculpture.
For further information see June Crespo. Vascular | Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa (guggenheim-bilbao.eus)
