Cristina Iglesias: "In art, you don't have to understand anything; you have to hear it."

BarcelonaBasque artist Cristina Iglesias (San Sebastián, 1956) has distinguished herself since the beginning of her career by going beyond sculpture understood as an object. "For me, it's always been more interesting to create a place and provoke a perception, an experience," says Iglesias in Barcelona, ​​where the Catalunya La Pedrera Foundation is dedicating an exhibition to her from this Thursday until January 25. According to the exhibition's curator, James Lingwood, there is also a latent or hidden content in Iglesias's work. "There are people who, when they look at art, say they don't understand the piece, that they aren't ready. Instead, it's quite the opposite: you have to let yourself go. In art, you don't have to understand anything, you have to hear it. You can see a work one day and feel it one way, and the next day another, and that has to do with psychology."

The exhibition, titled simply Cristina Iglesias. Passages, includes more than thirty works since 2002. A key to the selection of works and the installation has been a dialogue with the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. "It's about letting the building breathe, opening it up, not putting up walls. I was very interested in keeping everything open and everything, from the columns and curves of the interiors to the courtyards and the city, entering the exhibition," he says. Among the works on display, Iglesias debuts one, titled Mineral forest, designed for the living room. It consists of five modules reminiscent of petrified trees that create a narrow hallway, with an atmosphere somewhere between mysterious and sensual. As a curiosity, these pieces contain mushrooms and pieces of Chinese cabbage.

The Mineral Forest and the Sagrada Familia

"Another way to engage with Gaudí is by creating other illusions, spaces that aren't real. Mineral forest He plays with the columns of the room and makes them his own, collaborating with them to create a kind of plaza," says the artist. When faced with this work, it is inevitable to think of the vegetal masses of the Nativity façade of the Sagrada Família, and which Iglesias is currently one of the three shortlisted artists, along with Miquel Barceló and Javier Marín, to make a proposal for the Gloria façade. Iglesias has only said that his proposal is "in the thinking phase" and that it will be within his "language." The deadline for submitting proposals is at the end of the year, and the winner is expected to be announced during the first half of 2026. Since the Gloria façade is expected to feature hundreds of sculptures, Iglesias could play a part.

"Gaudí was concerned with the forms of the natural world—plants, beings, geology—and this is also something that distinguishes Cristina's work, although I don't think for the same reason. In Gaudí's case, there is a more pantheistic idea of our nature with Cristina Iglesias's work," says Lingwood. "In Cristina's work, you sense that humanity has been displaced from the center of things. So there is a challenge to an anthropocentric way of thinking." "This is Cristina Iglesias's first solo exhibition, and we wanted to showcase her creativity with key pieces that are representative of her career," says Marga Viza, the foundation's director of culture. "The dialogue we managed to create between the transferable pieces and the building demonstrates a combination of two art forms. Architecture takes on a much more artistic form."

Details of mushrooms and cabbages Mineral forest point to another fundamental feature of Iglesias's way of depicting nature: the importance of artifice, of combining fragments of nature with invented ones. "It's a fiction," says Iglesias. Precisely another feature of his work, as can be seen in some of the other works on display, Vegetable Room III and Pavilion of Dreams (Elliptical Galaxy), is that he used texts by two great science fiction authors, J.G. Ballard and Stanisław Lem, respectively. "Since I also write fiction, I use excerpts from other fictions, which are narratives with a beginning and an end that, for example, explain what a place is like." For example, Ballard's text woven into the bronze tapestries that make up the work speaks of a world after an ice age, a world that has become crystallized.

A choreography of sculptures

For Iglesias, the different materials are like "vehicles to move you or take you somewhere else." "Each material has its own meaning in my work," he explains. Thus, he goes beyond the strictly visual or tactile, and with water, introduces sound and a temporal dimension, as can be seen in the different wells on display, the first of which can be seen in the courtyard of La Pedrera overlooking Passeig de Gràcia. "The exhibition is not a retrospective, but rather we conceived it choreographically," says Lingwood. "The choreography is between Cristina's works and Gaudí's building and spaces," the curator adds, "and the experience of walking through these spaces, which has a lot to do with movement. So, we conceived the exhibition as a sequence of movements through some of his largest and most ambient pieces." "His work is very physically present, but it also has the added factor of inviting the audience to speculate, to embark on an imaginative journey," Lingwood emphasizes.

This illusory sensation is also found in the two-dimensional works: the spaces that can be seen in some gigantic prints are, in fact, images of models made with cardboard boxes enlarged. Further on, there are Turbulence, a bronze swirl that seems to absorb everything around it, and which makes one think about the way one relates to these works with one's entire body. Therefore, Iglesias's works can have a sensual or even erotic aspect. Thus, there are drawings of trunks that resemble skinned bodies, and enveloping pieces that seem to drip sap. "The interpretation of the works is quite open, and yes, there is an erotic relationship with that sense of openings, closings, and enveloping the viewer. Cristina really creates these spaces for the visitor to make these reflections," explains Lingwood.

Collaboration with great architects

Another aspect of Cristina Iglesias's career is her collaboration with great architects, including Rafael Moneo, Norman Foster, José Luis Mateo, Paul Robbrecht, and Hilde Daem. "They were magnificent opportunities because they allowed me to work on a different scale and address problems in sculpture that interested me," says the artist. "There is an essential dialogue with the building, but the work must retain its autonomy," she emphasizes. In Moneo's case, Iglesias created monumental doors for the extension of the Prado Museum, and in Josep Lluís Mateo's case, a tapestry made of braided copper strips hangs in the lobby of the Fòrum convention center.

Regarding the collaboration with Norman Foster on Bloomberg's headquarters in London, Iglesias created a kind of moat that protects the building and, at the same time, acts as "a meeting place in the midst of an inhospitable environment," as the artist herself says, currently working on public art projects. "In turbulent times like these, culture and art are necessary to create places of encounter and coexistence, which are essential in terrible times. Education is also needed in schools and on the streets so that people aren't afraid to approach art," Iglesias concludes.