Despite Ibon Aranberri’s significant contribution to questions about what might constitute contemporary sculpture, this is his first exhibition in the UK. Visitors to Unequal Diameters will be met by an array of objects, films and photographs that recount and reconfigure half-familiar situations and forms, among them a mountaineering expedition, drawings for trainee steel welders, makeshift urban security, a habitat for bats, and the armature of a statue of a Basque philosopher. Sometimes Aranberri’s works stand alone, each telling a particular (non-linear) story. At others they overlap and elide to create a precise exhibition itinerary. Often, they are manifestations of ongoing projects, transformed over time and specific exhibition contexts. Some in Unequal Diameters originated in the early 2000s when Aranberri came to international attention through a series of events and political interventions in Basque Country where he lives.
Aranberri explores the relationship between nature and culture, and modernity’s failure to subordinate or impose a totalising vision on the natural environment. He uses materials from the earth and from industrial history, often accumulated in modules or series (so in that sense post-minimal). What appears is fractured, archaeological, sometimes like ruins. Aranberri’s works carry the personal history of his journeys into landscapes, as well as the weight of cultural history and geological time. They evidence meticulous and associative thought processes, extrapolations from cultural and political histories which generate tentative possible contemporary sculpture. His work is also a tantalising open-ended puzzle, provoking the curiosity of an active observer.
Ibon Aranberri (born 1969) has exhibited in numerous European institutions including in solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel (2007), Fundació Antoni Tapies, Barcelona (2011), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2011), and Secession, Vienna (2014). He participated in documenta 12 (2007), Sydney Biennial 2008, and Busan Biennial 2012. A survey exhibition of his work will open at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, in October 2023
