June Crespo at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Artist: June Crespo

Exhibition title: Vascular

Curated by: Manuel Cirauqui

Venue: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain

Date: March 1 – June 9, 2024

Photography: ©Ander Sagastiberri / all images copyright and courtesy of the ©artist and ©Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The sculptural practice of June Crespo (b. Pamplona, 1982) is purposefully situated at the intersection of multiple pathways and contemporary lines of research. It engages in a transformative dialogue with the concepts that have shaped Basque art in recent decades—namely, “moving pairs” such as abstraction and gesture, the tragic and the opaque, lightness and strangeness. It also takes on certain pressing issues that have only recently been included within the broader debates, in particular with respect to feminist sensibilities and awareness of the devastation caused by modern lifestyles on the natural environment, now entirely subject to the cycles of industrial and post-industrial production and reproduction, amid the pressures of the Anthropocene.

Crespo’s practice has long had a living, active materiality, right up to the present day, and this character forms the very basis of Vascular, the exhibition presented at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The idea is to offer a new perspective on Crespo’s practice while inviting her, at the same time, to explore an unprecedented scale in her work. Crespo’s sculptures bring together and combine a wide range of diverse parts—molds of plants, clothes or found textiles, construction elements, concrete casts, magazines. By radically assembling them or changing their scale, they emphasize the stark contrast between the lived material and the structural elements that close off and channel our existence, be they ducts, metal sheets, molds, or formwork. Stems are then connected to them, or bits of textile or paper get trapped in their joints, while traces of technical operations, erosions, and accidents can be read in them as well. Bound by lashing straps, or simply resting upon each other, these elements appear to ceaselessly interrogate one another.

Along with a selection of pieces from the last seven years, Vascular features new and extraordinary work that combines recurring forms, gestures, and questions that are present in many of Crespo’s previous series. Examples of this include the sculptural or even architectural use of photographs, which become large-scale floor prints, or the presentation of structures used in industrial production or in building, such as work tables or raising platforms which serve to hold up the proliferation of vegetal forms, tubes, and cylinders in the gallery space. Vascular seeks to point out the internal communication within each of Crespo’s pieces and suggest transmissions between all the works included in the exhibition, which act like communicating vessels and capillary networks, both in terms of their material relations and the scarifications and marks that the artist incorporates on the surface of the sculpture.

-Manuel Cirauqui, Curator, Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa