June Crespo’s sculptural assemblages, which the artist understands as communicating vessels, resonate within our own bodies. At times delicate, at others forceful, they always emanate a vital, living quality.
Most of the works in the exhibition Danzante take their formal vocabulary from the Iris and the bird of paradise. Yet the artist is not concerned with representing these plants. Rather, they serve as starting points for a deeper engagement with materiality and the evocative potential of surfaces and textures, which take precedence over the pictorial dimension. Crespo treats her materials as agents, understanding herself an assistant to her own work rather than an authory figure. In this way, she offers us a visceral experience – an encounter with objects that touch us in our corporeality and heighten our awareness of our own presence and its fragmented condition.
It is only as we circle around the works that we begin to establish a relationship. Crucial to this experience is the choreography of the objects in the exhibition space – a space they respond to with their weight, proportions, and methods of suspension. This lets the artist produce unusual associations between architectural space and body, between flesh and stone, which she conceives of not as distinct but as intertwined entities. Some of the objects reach vertically, rising up as we too move upright through the exhibition; others emphasise their connection to the ground. Certain sculptures abide by the human scale, while others stretch above our heads through the open glass ceiling of the Secession.
The materials and their relationships to one another mirror intimate bodily sensations – how, for instance, the palate and tongue or eyelid and eye might feel in a given instant.
Crespo creates casts and moulds, in particular of organic elements like flowers, in plaster, bronze, or concrete by making 3D scans, a high-tech mode of production and representation that severs the objects from any kind of natural order. She plays with enlargement and fragmentation, and her works come with various surface structures – they are often abject, raw, or encrusted. She then combines these moulds and casts with found textiles or industrial building elements as well as her own apparel, choosing items that are especially close to the body to add an intimate scale to the work. The industrially produced elements reference the outer skins of buildings and their systems of evacuation and climatization.
Combining the organic and the technical, Crespo’s art not only reflects on the pressure and destruction wrought on nature by post-industrial production. It is also a process of reparation in terms of fixing fractures between things that did not seem to belong together but that are constructed and reconstructed in an alternative linking practice.
In Molar (2024), bronze, steel, and fabric intertwine to form a complex entity that suggests both constriction and embrace. The Dancing Column II (2025) consists of two concrete pillars nestled together; they might seem monumental were they not so tenderly placed on a voluminous cushion. The horizontal wall work TW, TG 2025 III (2025) is made of repurposed lorry tarpaulins the size of a trailer, arranged in a geometric grid and pierced by pipes that create an irregular pattern of holes to recall industrial functionality while seeming to vibrate with their own breath.
Repetition is a central motif in Crespo’s intuitive and experimental process. She consciously works with paradoxical material relationships of encounter and estrangement, creating tension, friction, and contrast. These corporeal unities are never static; they always seem to be in flux – object-bodies in transition. Or, in the artist’s own words: ‘I don’t want to cement an image, but propose an encounter between bodies, in the in-between. My aim is to bring things into relation, but in a liberated way – so the arrangement doesn’t feel like a forced construction. If the works are free, the viewer is freer too.’
June Crespo was born in Pamplona, Spain, in 1982. She lives in Bilbao, Spain. Programmed by the board of Secession Curated by Bettina Spörr
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring an essay by the writer and curator Catalina Lozano and a conversation between June Crespo and the writer and curator Marc Navarro. The artistic intervention consists of a printed photograph, part of the scanned material the artist worked with to compose the pages of the book. It is a material that traces the creative process and the way of relating to it and looking at it.
The digital publication is available for free at secession.at
June Crespo’s exhibition Danzante has been developed and co-produced in close collaboration by the Vienna Secession, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, and MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, where it will subsequently be on display.
