Cristina Iglesias Creates a Site-Specific Work for the Royal Academy of Arts

Wet Labryrinth (With Spontaneous Landscape) is the name of the installation commissioned from the artist by the London institution.

The installation ‘Wet Labyrinth (With Spontaneous Landscape)’ in the Anneberg Courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

“I seek to create a counterpoint between what exists and what I want to put there”, Cristina Iglesias says of her work. The San Sebastian-born artist, based in Madrid, is one of the most important creators working today, and her work is spread across museums and public spaces all over the world. Recognizing her significance and artistic career, the Royal Academy of Arts in London commissioned a site-specific work from Iglesias to be placed in the Anneberg Courtyard of its headquarters. At the same time, the Gagosian gallery in the British capital has opened an exhibition with some of her latest works: the immersive sculpture Crecimiento and several murals from the Entrelazado series. The name of the sculpture made for the RA, ‘Wet Labryrinth (With Spontaneous Landscape) / Laberinto humedo (Con Paisaje Espontaneo)’, speaks to us of the constants the creator investigates in her work: the presence of water, labyrinthine and interwoven forms and interaction with the surroundings.

Interior view of ‘Wet Labyrinth (With Spontaneous Landscape)’ 

In an interview with the online magazine Wallpaper, Iglesias noted that the work is a game with perception. “It creates an experience for the visitor who enters it, in which the real (the structure and the outside world), the fiction (the cast walls) and the reflection (the mirrors) intertwine with intensity. The sensation of humidity inside the structure, together with the sound of the water falling on the floor, adds further dimensions”. Originally, its presentation  was scheduled for the year 2020; the pandemic and its consequences delayed this opening by two years, and it now arrives coinciding with the Gagosian gallery show. The installation invites recollection and intimacy; after the confinement and social distancing imposed during these years, this aspect takes on a new meaning. Cristina Iglesias’s works always interact with their surroundings, merge with the landscape and intervene in nature without invading it. These are constants that are evident, for example, in ‘Hondalea’ (2021), an intervention carried out at the lighthouse of Santa Clara Island, in San Sebastian, and which she considers “her most extreme work”: an installation that becomes a real and imagined journey, playing with myth and with the concept of the abyss. Wet Labryrinth (With Spontaneous Landscape) not only retains this essence, but also brings the artist’s work into the setting of one of the most important institutions on the global art circuit.

You may also like

“Tiempo de magos”: The Prodigious Decade of 20th-Century Philosophy“Tus pasos en la escalera”. Waiting, as Told by Antonio Munoz MolinaNature Will Invade a Stadium in Klaus Littmann’s Next Intervention“La memoria esculpida”: Three Years of Conversations with Martin ChirinoThe COLECCIONA Encounters Visit the H.E.F. Collection of Juan EntrecanalesThe Museo Picasso de Malaga Opens the Largest Bruce Nauman Retrospective in 25 Years