Ana Laura Aláez

Opening on 17 May, MUSAC is to host Pabellón de Escultura, an exhibition project where artist Ana Laura Aláez returns to sculpture: the artistic medium of her origins and the one in which she has produced the bulk of her work. Loyal perpetuator of the Basque tradition, Aláez bravely explores her own past with a project that reflects upon the formal essence as a pure artistic manifesto, where sculpture and architecture meet in a spatial vacuum. Pabellón de Escultura is a project that reclaims the very act of artistic creation: a political stance that confronts the artist’s world with the audience and the artistic environment.

About Ana Laura Aláez To approach the world of Basque artist Ana Laura Aláez is to venture into the artificial paradise of appearances. A world where the canon is inverted, where identities are multifaceted, where aesthetic assumptions become ethical assumptions, and where harmony and beauty fill all the available space. Her work, however, is not limited to this narcissistic hedonism. Throughout her career, she has developed a private micro-universe by incorporating anything that might shine back her own reflection. She has not hesitated to wield humour, sarcasm and irony against the art world, to dissolve her own identity or to flirt with other industries that revolve around the art world, or are even asserting themselves as art proper: architecture, video, photography, design or music.

Her first work from the early 1990s toyed with the implications of artifice and the body, through themes as pertinent to the final years of the 20th century as identity and the projection of subjectivity, the presence of images, the uses of photography, hybrid and mutant identity, etc. This early work also revealed the lessons she had learnt from the most relevant artists of what was to be known as New Basque Sculpture, including Txomin Badiola or Ángel Bados. On the basis of this relationship with the body; with its uses and abuse; with its negation; with travesty, decorum and artifice; with its changes and experiments, the artist found an opening into new landscapes, new spaces related not only to the body, though this was a theme she would never leave behind entirely. New spaces inhabited by herself and other individuals; those spaces we imagine and build up, and then transform into artificial cosmetic delights.

We should not forget that a close bond has existed between architecture and the body throughout history: from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier, through Palladium or the Bauhaus, the coincidences, simulations and appearances linking both have provided the basis for a discourse that has reached our time. The whys and wherefores of these nuances are relevant to Ana Laura’s art precisely because she masks her work between those two poles and through everything related to the body (cosmetics, pose, cult, identity, look) alongside notions that have more to do with architecture: space, design, décor, proportion, restoration, canon, etc. On closer scrutiny, however, we appreciate that many of these nuances often overlap and are combinable. Taking the notion one step further, Ana Laura’s works could be seen as embodying a second skin, as can be appreciated in her installations She Astronauts (1997), at Fundación la Caixa’s Sala Montcada in Barcelona; She is in outer space (1997), at the Istanbul Biennale; Mobile Studio for an Artist of the 21st Century (1998), at the Pontevedra Biennale; Pink Room, Liquid Sky and Rain Room (2001), at the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; Dance & Disco (2001), at MNCARS’s Espacio Uno in Madrid; Beauty Cabinet Prototype (2003), at Palais de Tokio; or her project for the Towada Art Museum, Japan, in 2008.

On Pabellón de Escultura, a project for MUSAC

Pabellón de Escultura is Ana Laura Aláez’s project for MUSAC, due to open on 17 May, where she returns to sculpture in search of her roots. Since her very early work produced in the 1990s, Aláez embraced this discipline on the basis of her belief and her training. Indeed, even when working in the medium of photography or video, she has often been considered a sculptor, by virtue of her very special way of arranging the work in space, whether it be two- or three-dimensional. Pabellón de Escultura is an unwavering statement of her intentions and her roots, devoid of trappings or disguise, asserting sculpture as the essential point of departure for all her work, regardless of the nuances it may acquire along the way.

The project, which includes a number of pieces and items, should be taken as a whole, though each of the pieces in turn carries sufficient momentum to be appreciated as an independent work. Pabellón de Escultura is split into two spaces. A small triangular lobby welcomes the viewer with a figurative presentation of the work flooded in white light, between white walls, that provides an inkling of the crude, underground and even harsh nature of the world we are about to enter. This first installation includes black leather jackets slashed down the back, with sculptures emerging out of them. Here Aláez tells us about the body and its loss, about its relationship with other spaces, about sculpture as a prosthetic replacement of something lost, as opposed to the freestanding works on podia we will find later on. This first space acts as an “other” inverted or convex space against the second hall; a negative print offsetting the larger installation.

Crossing this first threshold we enter the hall that gives the exhibition its name, where the overpowering black of the walls underlines the presence of a “grand sculpture”. Measuring fifteen metres across and five metres high, this colossal piece takes on architectural proportions, though it never loses its original character as a sculpture. It is indeed a massive pure sculpture, made out of intersecting aluminium sheets assembled into a construction that expands chaotically. However, at the same time this architecture, like a good pavilion, reveals itself as something empty, ephemeral, like a venue for temporary use, a kiosk devoid of its posters, its claims, its propaganda... The political game is in the emptying out, in the silence and, naturally, in the placement of a sculpture this size within a museum context, whereby the artist challenges our modes of cultural production and our patterns for the social appropriation of representation spaces. In the light of all the above, Pabellón de Escultura’s narrative lies in its essences, in its very shape, in its explosion, in the vision of this massive multifaceted geometric pavilion that contains no sculptures, since its expansive form, which even encroaches on the museum walls themselves, is the message. Thus, the implements for representation explode within their own tradition, with the artist left feeling like an outsider cast away from the art world, sometimes a rebel, sometimes just misunderstood.

Pabellón de Escultura is a turning point in Ana Laura Aláez’s career, revisiting her entire creative universe and confronting her early sculpture from the 1990s with her latest production. All these works share a common feature: the solid, organic black of the sculptures that mourn on white podia spread out about the room, where bereavement appears to have replaced a vanishing belief in Utopia. One could nearly imagine that Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International had collapsed and the artist were at odds to glean hope out of past assumptions. In any case, her beliefs are not that different, since this new project demonstrates a seamless connection in Aláez’s work over more than ten years, thus establishing an ironic and perverse game that the artist continues to uphold as her stance before the world.

Ana Laura Alaez
Pabellón de Escultura (Sculpture Pavilion)

Kurator: Agustín Perez Rubio
Ort: Hall 3 (3.1 and 3.2)