Hauser & Wirth has announced its global representation of Spanish sculptor Cristina Iglesias. The gallery will include a new work, Entwined VI, by the artist in its booth at Art Basel later this month and will mount an exhibition for her at its London gallery in October.
The representation deal means she will depart Marian Goodman Gallery, which has shown her for over two decades. Iglesias is the latest high-profile artist to leave Marian Goodman in the past few years, with the most recent one being William Kentridge, who also joined Hauser & Wirth last year.
Iglesias has become known for creating site-specific installations that transform the environments in which they are installed. These have taken the form of suspended pavilions, hedge-like mazes made of bronze and steel, hanging sheets of lattice that play with light and shadow, aluminum casts of vegetation that seems to sprout from out of the floors and walls, and more.
“I am interested in the symbolic connotation of growth and metamorphosis,” Iglesias said in a statement. “The growth of living creatures has its own rhythm and is unstoppable. However, we constantly affect the environments in which we exist, and not always in a positive way. The idea of slowing down proliferation, solidifying millennia of evolution within layers of hardened matter puts our temporal existence into perspective.”
Her work has been widely exhibited internationally. She represented Spain at the 1986 and 1993 Venice Biennales and participated in the 1990 and 2012 editions of the Biennale of Sydney, the 2003 Taipei Biennale, the 2003 Carnegie International, and the 2006 Site Santa Fe International. In 2020, she was awarded the Royal Academy of Arts’s Architecture Prize, which came with an exhibition that opened at the London institution in 2022. In October, the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera in Barcelona will open a solo show for her.
“Over the course of her career, Cristina Iglesias has forged an extraordinary visual language that feels simultaneously unexpected and inevitable,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement. “She combines the conventional matter of sculpture—familiar materials such as glass, steel, bronze—with non-traditional like water and sound to produce works as powerfully mystical as they are muscular. And as her landmark public commissions prove, she possesses a rare sensitivity to the poetic potentials of natural and architectural space.”
