Tronc-Espai-Terra-Eina (16)

From the early 1970s onwards, Sergi Aguilar produced pioneering work that led to his selection as one of more than a hundred artists that curator Margit Rowell visited throughout Spain for the 1980 exhibition New Images from Spain. Held at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, it shared the bill there with an important Chillida retrospective, provocatively updating Spain’s national tradition.

His 1972 series Tronc-Espai-Terra-Eina (Trunk-Space-Land-Tool) was based on the small forked logs that the inhabitants of Menorca used to make tools. Their translation into bronze and brass maintains the idea of a hand-held tool by arranging the pieces on a horizontal plane similar to a workbench. The fragmented grammar that combines the abstract and the organic turns its parts into signs of a familiar yet unsolvable code