Ignasi Aballí – Diagrames
17 January – 7 March 2020
Opening: Thursday January 16th at 7 pm
Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) is one of the most renowned artists of his generation in the Spanish art world. His work deals with the boundaries between artistic creation and everyday life and often includes the use of household materials such as dust, newspaper cuttings or the fibre remains of a clothes dryer.
He applies a highly controlled methodology to his work, but it is often based on the artist’s non-intervention in order to leave the creative process in the hands of chance, light, time, etc. Another feature of his work is the expression of a presence arising from its absence, the use of opposing concepts, lists of words taken from newspapers dealing with the accumulation of information in the media or temporary interventions using the architecture of exhibition spaces or their walls as an artistic medium.
Galeria Toni Tàpies has produced two editions of unpublished engravings by the artist. The first, “Set estampacions d’una planxa de gravat” (Seven prints from an engraving plate) comprises, as its title indicates, seven prints from a blank engraving plate that changes position, always badly centred on the paper. As is often the case in Aballí’s work, their main protagonist is absence or invisibility. The image is simply suggested by the edges of this changing position plate. It could be said that these engravings provide a document of the performative act of placing the plate on some paper, regardless of whether it contains an image.
The second series, entitled “Esquema I a VI” (Diagrams I to VI), is like a school chart, with an ordered series of numbers at the bottom of the engraving that refer to the same numbers distributed randomly at the top, each indicating a blank space, like a metaphor for the indefinable. The numbers at the bottom in a second group all correspond to the word “Void”, which is randomly distributed at the top of the engraving, where the numbers are not accompanied by any images. The last group of this series has several boxes containing words such as “intangible”, “absent” or “inaccessible”, all indicating the difficulty of capturing ultimate reality, a similarly recurrent theme in the artist’s work.
The exhibition is completed by three drawings. The subject of two of these is the absence of dust that once covered them in an area of the paper that has been blown away. In the third, Aballí has employed the sheets of paper used to clean the engraving plates in a type of contact magic that transfers the creation from one medium to the other.
Ignasi Aballí has held several solo exhibitions both in Spain and abroad, including at MACBA (Barcelona, 2005), Fundação de Serralves (Porto, 2006), IKON Gallery (Birmingham, 2006), ZKM (Karlsruhe, 2006), Pinacoteca do Estat (São Paulo, 2010), Artium (Vitoria, 2012), Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2015), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, 2016), Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colómbia (Bogotá, 2017), Art Gallery Kula (Split, 2018) and Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb, 2018). His work has been displayed at various times in the following galleries: Estrany-De la Mota (Barcelona), Elba Benítez (Madrid) and Meessen de Clercq (Brussels), and has also been seen at: Proyecto Paralelo (Mexico City), Thomas Bernard-Cortex Athletico (Paris), Pedro Oliveira (Porto), Nordenhake (Berlin) and Blueproject Foundation (Barcelona). He participated in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), 8th Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates, 2007), 11th Biennale of Sydney (1998), 4th Guangzhou Triennial (China, 2012) and 13th Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador, 2016). He was awarded the Joan Miró Prize in 2015.