Sin título (Untitled)

Cristina Iglesias is one of Spain’s most important artists, with a well-established career, forming part of a coterie of fellow artists who have internationally renewed the conceptual framework of contemporary sculpture. She trained in London, in the context of the New British Sculpture scene. In 1993, Cristina Iglesias participated in the group exhibition The Sublime Void: On the Memory of the Imagination (Antwerp) alongside more than 20 contemporary artists, including Lili Dujourie, Franz West, Thomas Schütte, Jan Vercruysse, Rachel Whiteread, Robert Gober and Juan Muñoz. Her sculpture has always developed as a spatial element that transforms the location into its representation using fragments of architecture: domes, passageways, niches and doors that recreate the experience of a threshold.
The sculpture Untitled belongs to her early work from the mid-1980s, which she created using traditional Basque sculpture iron, to which she added pigmented cement. These early sculptural bodies reveal the strangeness of incorporating a narrative into the space in which they are integrated, like full-fledged spatial fictions.
In 1989, Iglesias described her intentions thus: ‘Just as painted architecture (in the Baroque period) functions as a stage backdrop (background) subordinate to the characters, here it becomes an illusory construction, a space enveloping absence. [...] Creating shadow (the place of shadow) so that light can exist, colour and light act as materials in the work. The impossibility of representation gives rise to a multiplicity of planes, places, reflections, transparencies and outside images.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio