Entre la retícula y la vida

From 9 September to 15 November, in the gardens of the Lázaro Galdiano Museum, you can enjoy an open-air sculpture exhibition organised in collaboration with Arte Madrid as part of the Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend. It is also being held as part of the 30th Ibero-American Summit, which seeks to strengthen regional cooperation, innovation and sustainable development.

The exhibition showcases the work of thirteen Ibero-American artists and presents an exploration of the tensions, dialogues and frictions that exist between systems of order and the organic experience of contemporary existence. The sculptures explore the way in which geometry, structure and repetition coexist with that which eludes control: the body, time, memory, chance and the constant transformation of living things.

Associated with rationality, progress and abstraction, since the historical avant-garde movements, the grid has become a universal language capable of organising space and reducing the complexity of the world to legible systems. However, countering this desire for control, we are so often driven by the very vitality of life – imperfect, changing and sensitive. The contemporary world has called into question precisely this aspiration for stability, revealing the cracks in any seemingly closed structure.

The sculptures in the exhibition occupy an intermediate space where the norm and deviation become a field of experimentation rather than a boundary. In several cases, the grid appears as a framework, a container or a visual structure; in others, it is fragmented, distorted or invaded by organic elements that alter its original logic.

Image credits:

• Tamara Arroyo: Ciclo vital (Life cycle), 2023. Galería Nieves Fernández