For some time now, La Pedrera invites artists to dialogue with the emblematic building in a kind of exchange between space and its own creation. Then, the artists’ work is updated, it acquires connotations and new meanings through contact with the place and, vice versa, La Pedrera is also rediscovered with new meanings that, latent, went unnoticed.
I remember La Pedrera inhabited by the ghosts of Antonio López; His painting was contagious and impregnated the entire building with a metaphysical or spectral dimension. I also remember the exhibition Under the sign of sexby Jaume Plensa. In this case there was a tension or energy that, metaphorically, was the reason for the contortion of architecture.
This is also the question of the present exhibition: a very powerful universethat of the artist Cristina Iglesias (San Sebastián, 1956), which confronts space in an exchange of meanings.
Many readings are possible, but Iglesias proposes a story and a dramatic interpretation of Gaudí. Her world – the artist herself has said it repeatedly – is the water tables, abyssal depths, plant organisms –or minerals– that grow like metastases, the telluric energies of the subsoil… All this is confronted with Gaudí. No one could suspect that, behind the sinuous and immaculate walls of La Pedrera, decomposition could live.
Pieces are exhibited that are metaphorically expressed as a disease: the series Entwined (2022), an organism, it is not known whether it is vegetal or mineral, that climbs, infecting the wall, like a vine. And so too Growth I (2018), which as its name indicates, “growth”, is intended –in an endless cannibalistic movement– to devour all the space.
View of the exhibition. Photo: Pau Fabregat / Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera
Furthermore, these pieces seem to secrete – encrusted with crystals or resins – spurious liquids. And by extension, in a line of continuity, we could also point out the set Bosque mineral (2025), made expressly for this exhibition.
It is Bosque mineral It is inspired by the columns of La Pedrera, but the proportions overwhelm: it seems that the growth to which they are destined is going to burst the entire building.
One of the most significant pieces is Plant path (2007). Here it is as if I had plunged a scalpel into the wall to see what’s behind your skin. And in the sectioned flesh of the wall appears that material so characteristic of Iglesias that represents filamentous plant elements… in a state of putrefaction.
But, perhaps, one of the most revealing pieces of the dramatic dimension of the exhibition is the one entitled Turbulence (2023). A relief of considerable dimensions and packaging that, isolated, emerges from the wall and represents a spiral, even more: a kind of brutal maelstrom…in La Pedrera.
Cristina Iglesias: ‘Untitled (Vegetable Room III), 2005. Photo: Pau Fabregat / Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera
And it is, we said, one of the most significant pieces, not only because of the metaphorical dimension that “turbulence” implies, but also because the circular shapes of the vortex They are a parallel or equivalent manifestation of curved shapesand undulating of the building. Between the turbulence of Iglesias and the sinuosities of La Pedrera there is a superposition of meanings, the one and the other are confused.
One of Iglesias’ best-known works are the so-called “wells.” Broadly speaking, it imitates the external appearance of a simple cube that induces the viewer to look inside to see to the example of Donald Judd’s cubes.
However, in this case, inside there is a fountain or spring of water in constant movement. The symbol of water and the well is of particular richness: purification, salvation, interior contemplation… But other readings are possible. The well is the metaphor of the subconscious, that which is hidden and cannot be revealed, of death, of putrefaction.
The exhibition begins and concludes with two very similar works: it begins with Suspended runner II (2006) and ends with The Pavillon of Dreams (Elliptical Galaxy) (2016). Both are a structure built with pieces of twisted wire lattice that defines a micro space with shadows and lights.
Cristina Iglesias: ‘Entwined XII’, 2022. Photo: Pau Fabregat / Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera
The same artist has explained that she has been inspired by science fiction literary works and that the lattices, like hieroglyphs, are made with words. In some way, these structures, a space within another, are a kind of refuge from which the world and places are observed and, above all, dreamed of.
In other words, these structures are like narrative devices – associated with contemplation and inner reflection – that tell stories, in some way represent the artist’s house – and by extension the viewer – or the space of creation where stories germinate and endthe starting point and the end of the narrative.