Hauser & Wirth has announced its global representation of Spanish sculptor Cristina Iglesias. The gallery will include a new work, Entangle viby artists at Art Basel’s booth later this month and will hold an exhibition for her at the London Gallery in October.
The agency agreement means she will leave Marian Goodman Gallery, which has been showing her for twenty years. Iglesias is the latest famous artist in the past few years, leaving Marian Goodman, the most recent being William Kentridge, who also joined Hauser & Wirth last year.
Iglesias has become known for creating site-specific installations to change the environment in which they are installed. These are in the form of hanging pavilions, mazes of hedges made of bronze and steel, lattice sheets hanging with light and shadows, aluminum vegetation that seems to sprout from the floor and walls, and more.
“I am interested in the symbolic meaning of growth and deformation,” Iglesias said in a statement. “The growth of biological beings has its own rhythm and is unstoppable. However, we constantly influence the environment in which we exist, and do not always affect in a positive way. The idea of slowing proliferation has consolidated the layers of reinforcement matter for millennia, making our time existence make our temporary existence a point of view.”
Her works have been widely displayed internationally. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennales in 1986 and 1993, and participated in the Sydney Biennale in 1990 and 2012, the Taipei Biennale in 2003, Carnegie International in 2003 and Santa Fe International in 2006. In 2020, she was awarded the Royal Academy of Arts Architecture Award, which opened in 2022 at a London institution.
“In her career, Cristina Iglesias forged an extraordinary visual language, while unexpected and inevitable,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement. “She combines traditional materials of sculpture – familiar materials such as glass, steel, copper, and non-traditional materials such as water and sound to produce mysterious works as powerful as muscles. As her public commission for landmarks proves, she has a rare sensitivity to the poetic potential of nature and architectural spaces.”
