June Crespo. Vascular

The sculptural practice of June Crespo (b. Pamplona, 1982) is purposefully situated at the intersection of multiple pathways and contemporary lines of research. It engages in a transformative dialogue with the concepts that have shaped Basque art in recent decades—namely, “moving pairs” such as abstraction and gesture, the tragic and the opaque, lightness and strangeness. It also takes on certain pressing issues that have only recently been included within the broader debates, in particular with respect to feminist sensibilities and awareness of the devastation caused by modern lifestyles on the natural environment, now entirely subject to the cycles of industrial and post-industrial production and reproduction, amid the pressures of the Anthropocene.

Crespo’s practice has long had a living, active materiality, right up to the present day, and this character forms the very basis of Vascular, the exhibition presented at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The idea is to offer a new perspective on Crespo’s practice while inviting her, at the same time, to explore an unprecedented scale in her work. Crespo’s sculptures bring together and combine a wide range of diverse parts—molds of plants, clothes or found textiles, construction elements, concrete casts, magazines. By radically assembling them or changing their scale, they emphasize the stark contrast between the lived material and the structural elements that close off and channel our existence, be they ducts, metal sheets, molds, or formwork. Stems are then connected to them, or bits of textile or paper get trapped in their joints, while traces of technical operations, erosions, and accidents can be read in them as well. Bound by lashing straps, or simply resting upon each other, these elements appear to ceaselessly interrogate one another.