Room 11

In the late 1970s, the geometry of sculpture incorporated the vocabulary and phenomenology of minimalism to renew the formal repertoire and the relationship with space. New sculptures became elements interpreting the place where they were installed, opening up new possibilities for audience participation. The influence of structuralist language fragmented works into small elements that were reconfigured into novel patterns, revealing the structure of things, or that—using theatrical means to achieve an architectural dimension—transformed the space in which they were inserted into representation. In a way, the public vocation of sculpture has something urban about it, and the sensitivity of the period’s photographers captured that same presence of interpretive volumes in fragments of the city understood as built architecture. 

This “new Spanish sculpture” enjoyed widespread international recognition, beginning with the New Images from Spain exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1980, featuring works by Sergi Aguilar, Susana Solano, and Carmen Calvo. Whereas in previous generations sculptors such as Anthony Caro had looked at Basque sculpture’s evolution from previous cohorts, there was now a historic synchrony between New British Sculpture by artists such as Richard Deacon and the work of, among others, Cristina Iglesias and Juan Muñoz. It was a dream of simultaneity that seemed to become unreachable in the following decade.