English
Between 8th February and 2nd March, Asier Mendizabal will be showing at Madrid´s Reina Sofia Museum. The celebrated Spanish artist approaches art from highly political and ideological vantage points, drawing upon an idea of the popular imagination – it is this which is the defining force behind his work.
Asier Mendizabal was born in Ordizia, in the Basque Country, in 1973. He studied Fine Art at the Basque Country University, and was granted a scholarship from Amsterdam´s de-Ateliers arts funds organisation. In 2010, he won The Spanish National Radio Critical Eye award for Art.
Mendizabal, though of the post-Franco generation, has constructed his artistic imagination from a political aesthetic, examining the landscape, symbols, icons and linguistic codes of the movement of the revolutionary left in the 1970s.
From his investigation into street subculture, and the left-wing punk-rock movement led by bands such as The Clash and Joy Division, arose the material for Mendizabal´s artworks, which encompass the cultural, the political, and the popular, forging a strong link back to Basque cultural history.
In his constant search for the most suitable mode of expression, the artist alternates between sculpture, installation, design, cinema, video and writing, in order to best reflect the themes that drive him – principally, the ideology of the left as a unifier of people, and trigger for cultural change throughout history.
Of his exploration of aesthetics, Mendizabal says it requires, “a specific way of thinking, with signs.” Immanuel Kant defined the aesthetic as a chain, or link of representations which is created when a feeling has been provoked by an object. If representations are marked by their place in society, we can conclude that every artist expresses their thought and ideology through their artistic representation – or as Mendizabal puts it, their way of thinking.
Mendizabal is considered to be amongst those artists who focus their attention on the relations between form, discourse and ideology. His work might be described as an activity of reexamining the cultural and aesthetic impact of the 20th century leftist movements, and the revolutionary vanguards – the way in which the realism of the Soviet aesthetic dominated poster and political leaftlet design, or the red and black of the anarchist flag used by FAI during the Civil War, which was later reproduced by the sandinistas, and the revolutionary groups of Latin America. These aesthetic hallmarks of an ideology signify a specific way of viewing the world.
For more information: http://www.museoreinasofia.es/exposiciones/futuras.html?
Nancy Guzman
If you visit Madrid, and are interested in art and politics, this exhibition is unmissable. Be transported back to the city during the 1970s, and then get some well-deserved rest at your rented Madrid accommodation .
Translated by: Poppy
