Álbum de recortables (Cut-Outs Album)

Filmmaker and graphic artist Iván Zulueta occupies a unique place in the history of Spanish cinema and visual culture. Although his filmography is limited, his work is characterised by a radically experimental approach that goes beyond the limits of conventional film, extending into collage, graphic design and photography. Initially trained in New York, where he studied at the Arts Students League in 1964, Zulueta came into contact with pop art, avant-garde cinema and underground culture.  

Andy Warhol’s famous pop-up Index Book (1967) and Tom Wesselmann’s 3D paintings provided decisive formal influences for his own pop-ups. His scrapbooks should not be seen as traditional photo albums designed to organise a life story through normative milestones such as birth, communion, weddings and children, but rather as open, heterogeneous devices. Zulueta cut images from magazines, advertising bodies and portraits of film stars, creating an affective archive of obsessions, fetishes, fragmented bodies and pop icons, and combined them with his own personal archive of travel photographs and Polaroids of friends, lovers and partygoers. This blending dissolves hierarchies between the public and private, commercial and intimate, and permitted and clandestine spheres.

Raúl Martínez Arranz