Aitor Ortiz
23 Mar - 05 May 2012
AITOR ORTIZ
2002 - 2012
23 March - 5 May, 2012
After his highly acclaimed show at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2011, Nusser & Baumgart are pleased to announce Aitor Ortiz's second solo show with the gallery in Munich. The exhibition will include work from the past decade, in dialogue with a site specific installation, similar to the presentation in Bilbao.
A fully illustrated 200 page catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Guggenheim, Bilbao and at Fotografiska, The Swedish Museum of Photography, Stockholm, by HatjeCantz, Germany is available.
“The work Aitor Ortiz executes with architecture as his base is a sort of alchemic transformation. Buildings are his starting point, structures that in previous work were duplicated, repeated themselves, squared up in opposition to themselves, creating non-existent places. With the sleigh of hand of transposing a building or an architectural structure to an unforeseen place, or of taking the areas of a building the very purpose of whose construction is to carry us, lead us, guide us to another
place – passages, stairways, doors -, to transform them into a labyrinth, Ortiz came close to a kind of post-surrealism, post-futurism. Phantasmagoric, but real, buildings set out of their context, were the subjects of mysteriously beautiful images. His work as a photographer of architecture equipped him with the skills for approaching concrete, for having an
awareness of the places to be found in buildings and discovering their most unforeseen expressions.
The most well-known pictures from the previous stage of his career take us to imaginary worlds constructed with elements, fragments of reality, like a post-industrial Piranesi. For contemporary images, they have a certain air of romantic classicism. The silence of those grey landscapes, of those uninhabited infinities, talk to us of dreams and nightmares, of a creation of places with neither boundaries nor coordinates one can pin down. The artist was situated in a non-place, an intermediate space between memory, reality and imagination. What resulted were these images, recognisable and at times impossible to define, to locate, to retain. Exact structures, mathematically perfect, symmetrical, ordered, with a minimalist touch in a systematic repetition of modules, constructions great in their magnificence, at times reminiscent of science- fiction landscapes.
The pictures he offers us now are conceived in another way, from another perspective. We could begin by saying that these are creations approached from a later perspective, one that is more subjective than the previous phase of his work and, at the same time, more modern in terms of creative concept. In the series in hand, space appears in a very different way than it did in other previous picture. On this occasion there is nothing excessive, there is no grandeur, nor, even, is there that setting of a created reality. Now the walls, the columns, the space, appear to be pierced, wounded by a gaze that creates unease. The essential difference is that this time someone moving about within them, investing them with life. Now they are not hieratical, majestic or symbolic spaces, they have ceased to be lovely pictures for a gallery.”
(text: Rosa Olivares)
Aitor Ortiz was born in Bilbao, Spain in 1971. His multiple awarded work has been exhibited widely internationally.
Solo shows include ‘Laboratorio’, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2011); ‘Aitor Ortiz 1995-2010’, Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm, ‘Gap, Espacio latente’, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Espanol, Valladolid / Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián;
Group shows include ‘A new view of Spanish Photography and Video Art’, Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Schweden & Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway (2008), ‘Jano, la doble cara de la fotografía. Fondos de la Colección Permanente’, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2007).
2002 - 2012
23 March - 5 May, 2012
After his highly acclaimed show at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2011, Nusser & Baumgart are pleased to announce Aitor Ortiz's second solo show with the gallery in Munich. The exhibition will include work from the past decade, in dialogue with a site specific installation, similar to the presentation in Bilbao.
A fully illustrated 200 page catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Guggenheim, Bilbao and at Fotografiska, The Swedish Museum of Photography, Stockholm, by HatjeCantz, Germany is available.
“The work Aitor Ortiz executes with architecture as his base is a sort of alchemic transformation. Buildings are his starting point, structures that in previous work were duplicated, repeated themselves, squared up in opposition to themselves, creating non-existent places. With the sleigh of hand of transposing a building or an architectural structure to an unforeseen place, or of taking the areas of a building the very purpose of whose construction is to carry us, lead us, guide us to another
place – passages, stairways, doors -, to transform them into a labyrinth, Ortiz came close to a kind of post-surrealism, post-futurism. Phantasmagoric, but real, buildings set out of their context, were the subjects of mysteriously beautiful images. His work as a photographer of architecture equipped him with the skills for approaching concrete, for having an
awareness of the places to be found in buildings and discovering their most unforeseen expressions.
The most well-known pictures from the previous stage of his career take us to imaginary worlds constructed with elements, fragments of reality, like a post-industrial Piranesi. For contemporary images, they have a certain air of romantic classicism. The silence of those grey landscapes, of those uninhabited infinities, talk to us of dreams and nightmares, of a creation of places with neither boundaries nor coordinates one can pin down. The artist was situated in a non-place, an intermediate space between memory, reality and imagination. What resulted were these images, recognisable and at times impossible to define, to locate, to retain. Exact structures, mathematically perfect, symmetrical, ordered, with a minimalist touch in a systematic repetition of modules, constructions great in their magnificence, at times reminiscent of science- fiction landscapes.
The pictures he offers us now are conceived in another way, from another perspective. We could begin by saying that these are creations approached from a later perspective, one that is more subjective than the previous phase of his work and, at the same time, more modern in terms of creative concept. In the series in hand, space appears in a very different way than it did in other previous picture. On this occasion there is nothing excessive, there is no grandeur, nor, even, is there that setting of a created reality. Now the walls, the columns, the space, appear to be pierced, wounded by a gaze that creates unease. The essential difference is that this time someone moving about within them, investing them with life. Now they are not hieratical, majestic or symbolic spaces, they have ceased to be lovely pictures for a gallery.”
(text: Rosa Olivares)
Aitor Ortiz was born in Bilbao, Spain in 1971. His multiple awarded work has been exhibited widely internationally.
Solo shows include ‘Laboratorio’, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2011); ‘Aitor Ortiz 1995-2010’, Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm, ‘Gap, Espacio latente’, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Espanol, Valladolid / Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián;
Group shows include ‘A new view of Spanish Photography and Video Art’, Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Schweden & Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway (2008), ‘Jano, la doble cara de la fotografía. Fondos de la Colección Permanente’, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2007).