Cristina Iglesias + Adolfo Schlosser + Chema Lumbreras
Cristina Iglesias
Vegetable Room III is a very representative installation in Cristina Iglesias’ career, characterised by an interest focused on the contrast of materials and textures, as well as on the relationship that the pieces establish with the space that surrounds them. Her work brings a renewed conception of the practice of sculpture, seeking a poetic and symbolic balance and commitment between the pieces and the space. Since the 1990s, Iglesias has been developing labyrinthine rooms that invite the spectator to enter them. The vegetal rooms are rooms or passageways that the visitor must walk through. To the discovery that this route implies, we must add the lighting effects, the horror vacui that determines a proliferation of forms reminiscent of plants and the variety of textures of the components, among which noble materials such as bronze are mixed with resins or wood.
Adolfo Schlosser
Austrian by birth, Adolfo Schlosser settled in Spain in the mid-1960s, where he lived until his death and developed his artistic career on the basis of conceptual and minimalist art. After an initial period of geometric language, Schlosser created his own vocabulary in close relation to nature and used sculpture as a means of art and experimentation. He investigated with materials such as plastic, methacrylate, rope and rubber bands, but later began to experiment with organic materials taken directly from nature. Spiral is a sculpture characteristic of his work with natural elements, sought and found in the mountains of Madrid, where he lived; a form of domestication of the landscape, in which the branch is subjected to a spiral held in place by a clamping system so that the form remains. A simple, direct, fragile and forceful work in a play of tensions.
Chema Lumbreras
The great drawing technique of the figurative artist Chema Lumbreras not only allows him to stand out through two-dimensional compositions, but also serves him to generate his sculptures and installations, which are always well constructed and well defined. The protagonist of his works, as mentioned above, is the figure; in this case the “anthropomorphic” figure, since in his plastic universe it is common to find bodies with animal heads. The sense of humour and literary influence is evident in his work. Many of these animals or people seem to be taken from fairy tales, where anatomical scale reductions abound, offering in certain works a kind of homage to Lilliput. The artist, however, goes beyond a representation or illustration inspired by the work of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), but uses the figure as an ironic resource from which to question the human condition. The little dolls, which we can see in the piece presented, The Broken Branch, show fragility or instability, as if they were leaves, fruit, birds or insects hanging from the flora; they are metaphors for the human condition, subject not only to the weakness of the biological support, but also to the vicissitudes of our condition as social beings. In short, “the lightness of being” (Milan Kundera).