Exhibitions

Remigio Mendiburu (Hondarribia, Gipuzkoa, 1931-Barcelona, 1990) is one of the most unique figures in Basque sculpture from the second half of the twentieth century. His career falls within the update of Basque art at that time, which he participated in since 1966 with the Gaur group, promoted by Jorge Oteiza, which combined the artistic proposals of Eduardo Chillida, Rafael Balerdi, Amable Arias, José Antonio Sistiaga, Néstor Basterretxea and José Luis Zumeta. With a variety of backgrounds and interests, and expressing themselves in different languages, these painters and sculptors shared the aspiration to break the isolation of the Franco dictatorship and regain their own voice via an art that was committed to the avant-garde.

In the context of the modernisation of sculpture launched by Chillida and Oteiza, especially in their early days, Mendiburu was capable of creating an oeuvre with unique interests and procedures, using wood as his main material and the local culture as the point of departure for wholly personal and contemporary sculpture.

Curated by Juan Pablo Huércanos—deputy director of the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation (Alzuza, Navarra) and an expert in the oeuvre of this Basque sculptor—the exhibition Mendiburu. Matter and Memory, which takes its name by the book of the same name by the philosopher Henri Bergson, explores the personality of this creator via around 100 pieces, including sculptures and works on paper. They were made throughout his entire career: from his beginnings in the late 1950s until his last projects in the mid-1980s. Many of them have never before been seen, and as a whole they are now being exhibited thanks to the support of BBK and the generosity of the Mendiburu family and other private collectors, joined by museums like Artium in Vitoria-Gasteiz, San Telmo Museoa in San Sebastian and the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum.

The exhibition highlights the aspects that separate Mendiburu from the formal conventions of his day and resituate him as the author of experiential sculpture. The type of materials he used and the complexity of his constructions, based on accumulation and interweaving became the hallmarks of works brimming with biographic and sociocultural correspondences, which became one of the touchstones in the transformation of the art of his day.

After getting his start in the 1950s, still the heir to geometric and Informalist works, Mendiburu began to inquire into procedures closer to an organic, processual morphology which he used to construct his most characteristic works based on assemblages.

This accumulative process is one of his most personal contributions, a modus operandi that is an essential feature of his sculpture, while also transmitted to the experience of viewing his works. The experiential nature of Mendiburu's works can be seen in his early pieces, such as the series Taluak (1960–1962), whose construction is reminiscent of a child's game of dragging a lump of clay on the ground to break it up and change its morphology. This can also be seen in other masterpieces from his career, such as Txalaparta (1965), where one can perceive the echo of popular culture and materials --"old beams or old forgotten trunks..."--that Mendiburu takes up with a personal language that is a far cry from a merely romantic view of nature. Even though his view of the natural can clearly be seen, by using wood Mendiburu explores a territory which reflects the passage of time and its mystery and bears witness to a natural order in which humanity is bent on struggling for its survival.

In this way, the spectator is impelled to disentangle the process by which the work was created, most of which, with no platforms, are shown directly and concisely, like the artist himself. In JCage for Free Birds (1969), a wooden beam holds a spatial development from which a more lyrical expression emerges. Meantime, Zugar (1969–1970) depicts a corporality arising from the slow accumulation of fragments which he later used in other prominent pieces, such as the enormously physically and visually striking Argi hiru zubi (1977) and Murru (1978).

In the 1980s, Mendiburu experimented with other materials and languages in small works, such as the series of pieces that combine wood and cement, and the small Oriental-inspired sculptures made of polished wood and alabaster. Late in the decade, other works, such as those from the Bombarded Houses series, revive the memory of the penuries of the war and the bitter exile that Mendiburu experienced as a child, which, towards the end of his life, he acknowledged as core experiences in the development of his sculpture.

 

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