Vascular (4)

In her mainly sculptural practice, June Crespo (Pamplona, 1982) uses industrial construction materials, casts from everyday objects, and structure ensembles whose material properties guide her studies in intuitive, instinctive ways. Collecting and putting together dissimilar elements – plant casts, clothes, textiles, construction items, concrete pouring, photographs –, combining them in dramatic layouts, and altering their scale, Crespo’s sculptures highlight the contrast between the living material and the structural elements that organize, enclose, and steer life. The sculptures in her Vascular series (2024), which lent their name to the big exhibition held at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, remind us of channeling circuits and also vascular systems in living organisms: roots, stems, pipes, wires, limbs, joints, ducts…

The rich connections and developments can be seen in the sculptural series of which Vascular Ensemble (1), Vascular (4), and Vascular (5) are the most representative pieces. Like many of Crespo’s previous works, Vascular (5) looks like a functional item, but it eludes every principle of use and shows sections and cuts where the artist explores open meanings and feelings of estrangement and wonder. Its deceptively simple tubular layout is the result of the use of a type of steel tear plates used in heavy-duty or industrial floors. Vascular Ensemble (1) and Vascular (4) reproduce on a large scale the casts of flowers scanned using photogrammetry. The flower stems (in cast bronze or steel) expand horizontally like erratic pipes, supported by metal tables or steel props – a common sight in industrial workshops –, with a giant image of worn clothing underneath. The big bronze elements show cracks and traces of other metals that have undergone deterioration or damage in the foundry – like scars on the skin of the sculpture. Making no effort to hide their origins or their artificiality, June Crespo’s works act like communicating vessels or networks of capillaries, in terms of both their material narratives and the underlying meanings that come to the surface in each sculpture.