Una. El pródigo (E. L.) (One. The Prodigal [E. L.])

Txomin Badiola was part of the New Basque Sculpture group, which critics identified following the 1984 exhibition Mitos y delitos (Myths and Crimes) in Barcelona. He has played an important role as a teacher at the University of the Basque Country and in Arteleku workshops, which he directed alongside Ángel Bados in 1994 and 1998. He is also the author of the catalogue raisonné
of Jorge Oteiza’s oeuvre. During his stay in New York in the 1990s, Badiola worked on hybrid pieces constructed from the laminated material commonly found in 1950s American furniture, which were influenced by modernist forms reminiscent of such furniture, but which cannot be used.
In the series Una — named after the daughter of the father of Soviet Suprematism, Kazimir Malevich — he alludes to ‘a kind of family constellation in which the leader is at the centre, surrounded by prodigal sons, gifted students, rivals, accomplices ...’, according  to the author himself. The Jacobsen chair, as a popular design, alludes to humanness — as an everyday object with which one has a deeply internalised physical relationship and as a symbol of avant-garde utopia — and to the concept of family (whether personal or artistic).

Carmen Fernández Aparicio