Manu Muniategiandikoetxea .- Eraztunak. Anillos
08/Sep/2022 - 22/Oct/2022
Eraztunak. Anillos (Eraztunak. Rings) is the title of MANU MUNIATEGIANDIKOETXEA‘s seventh solo exhibition at the Espacio Mínimo gallery whose starting point is a project that he initially conceived in response to a commission for a museum exhibition, which was never carried out, and which origin is a piece created in 2006, Paisaje circular (Circular Landscape), an oil on okume laser cut into concentric circles and converted into a ring puzzle.
Form and painting have found a point of connection in this exhibition. Form and representation, action and concept coincide at the same point, in the same place. In the works shown here there is an idea about the overlapping of plots. It could also be a superposition of codes, geometries or landscapes. Something that has been alive in the artist’s way of working for a long time, but that has become much more evident and fundamental in recent years. The relationship between physical structure, material, gesture or pictorial expression, overlap. An idea that was already evident in previous works by the artist, such as the series of parallels in Cézanne’s drawings that made up his previous exhibition in our space.
Painting, and the postulates of painting, are always present in the work of MUNIATEGIANDIKOETXEA. There is in his work a continuous attempt to overcome problems and limitations by adding elements that broaden paths and create new possibilities. Moreover, the artist tries to go beyond the plane of representation, but continuing within the reflection on the own nature of painting. Also, underlining the temporality that painting has as an action and acting in space. Working on his capacity for dialogue with sculpture and architecture.
About this project, produced during the artist’s residency at Tabakalera in San Sebastián, with the aid for artistic creation granted by the Basque Government during the pandemic period, he explains:
The lock down has changed us and it is clear that when circumstances change, everything changes. I don’t see it as a problem, but as an opportunity. The artist, and I guess it’s the human condition, all of us adapt to new circumstances and work with them. This series of pieces are the result of this new moment. There are times when it seems that we are lost in the forest and that we have passed through the same place several times, but we do not realize that everything has changed, the forest itself, but especially us. Time is another.
When these pieces produced in Tabakalera, a space with a huge dimension, were transferred to the studio, with its spatial limitations and the dynamics of another workshop, all the elements that we have highlighted – the volume, the material, the dimensions – begin their process of crisis and transformation, and the pieces appear, become or disappear. They seek a solution, a stability.
In this way, the relationship of the pieces with the place they occupy, with the architecture, the monumentality, the proportion, is another of its most outstanding elements, and makes them transgress or go beyond the very fact of being painted pieces. They are works that interact forcefully with the space that welcomes them and with the viewer who contemplates them.
MANU MUNIATEGIANDIKOETXEA (Bergara, 1966), has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country in the specialties of Painting and Sculpture. He has exhibited individually in institutional halls such as Sala Rekalde in Bilbao (Ni ez nain hemengoa in 2004), CAB. Caja de Burgos Art Center (Baga biga higa in 2007), Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea in San Sebastián (Behar Gori Primavera Azul in 2008), La Conservera de Murcia (Night Flight in 2010) or the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation in Alzuza, Navarra ( Interpretaciones 7 in 2014) and in outstanding group exhibitions such as the exhibition of Young Art (Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid 1994), Mutant Painting (MARCO. Museum of Contemporary Art, Vigo 2006), Future Plans (Baluarte, Pamplona 2007) or Zeru Bat, Hamaika bide. Artistic practices in the Basque Country between 1977 and 2002 (Artium, Vitoria, 2020). He has participated in important international fairs such as ARCO, FRIEZE ART FAIR, ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH (with the individual project Orain, Berriz, Gulliver in the Art Positions sector of the 2004 edition) or CIGE. China International Gallery Exhibition (in 2008 with the individual project El Bosque de Ozú / Ozú’s Forest). He has obtained, among others, the Caja Madrid Generation 2000 First Prize, the Gure Artea Prize from the Basque Government in 2000, the Endesa Scholarship in 2001 and the Altadis Scholarship in 2005, and has works, among other outstanding public and private collections, in the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum in Madrid, the ARTIUM Museum in Vitoria, the University of Navarra Museum in Pamplona, the CIFO Fontanals Cisneros Foundation in Miami, the Unión Fenosa Collection in La Coruña, the Contemporary Art Collection at the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid, the CAM Collection of Valencia, the Altadis Collection, the Caja Madrid Collection, the Kutxa Collection, the Caja Burgos Collection, the Collection of Junta de Extremadura, the Collection of the Autonomous Community of Murcia, the Álava Museum of Fine Arts, the Banco de Spain, the L’Oreal Collection, the Coca-Cola Spain Foundation or the City Councils of Pamplona and Vitoria. In 2022 he received the grant from the Academy of Spain in Rome.
