The work of the Spanish artist June Crespo is immersed in the tradition of contemporary Basque sculpture. She has mastered its signature techniques of aluminium and steel casting, which she combines with materials such as concrete and textiles.
Her work is a continuation of a line of women sculptors featured in solo exhibitions at the Crédac, from the Canadian artist Liz Magor (2016) to the German Alexandra Bircken (2017). Like them, Crespo draws on the memory of objects, the body and the skin. Added to this is her relationship with nature, a major concern for her artistic generation. Nature is evoked here by oversized cast flowers, displayed horizontally, suspended from the wall or presented vertically on steel shelving. The human scale chosen by the artist blurs the lines of representation and renders the forms almost abstract.
Crespo’s exhibition layout at the Crédac highlights the industrial characteristics of the venue, brought out by the situating of her sculptures in its spaces. Her work also infiltrates the interstices of its architecture, inhabiting it. By inserting the sculpture No Osso (Occipital) inside the building’s viscera, it opens the structure to the viewer’s gaze. This is typical of an artist whose aim is to reveal the solids and hollows of objects, including the most unusual, discreet or even invisible.
Trained at the Fine Arts Department of the University of the Basque Country, known for its long tradition of teaching sculpture, June Crespo (Pamplona, 1982, lives and works in Bilbao) explores the expressive possibilities of materials and their combinations. In works that are often look as sturdy as they are monumental, delicate gestures are unveiled that blur the line between the industrial and the organic. Sometimes anthropomorphic, sometimes minimal and abstract, in both formal and symbolic terms her chimerical sculptures converse with and explore the body, while anything but explicit.
Through a complex and poetic process of construction in her studio, Crespo’s makes pieces out of everyday items and collected materials that seem to have been awaiting her and with which she weaves emotional ties.
She begins by making moulds from forms she perceives intuitively by means of a highly developed sensitivity. But she is not interested in faithfully reproducing these things. They are matrices that she strips of all function, use or meaning. In order to transform this original form, Crespo adds materials (clay, silicone, stone or cement), exploiting their intrinsic properties, their flexibility and rigidity.
She introduces organic materials such as flowers to generate surface effects and new forms. Vascular (3) and Vieron sur casa hacerse campo (4) take as their starting point strelitzia, commonly known as the “bird of paradise flower,” while the Traction series is based on irises. Crespo subjects their three-dimensional measurements to a spectacular change of scale, and each stage moves away from the original forms towards more visceral ones.
The original motif dissolves into irregularities and crevices; the forms that emerge become the channels, tubes or shells that constitute the formal vocabulary and strata of her sculptures. For Molar I and Molar II she made a cast of the pommel and padding of a riding saddle, which she melted down into stainless-steel multiples. In their superimpositions, one can discern the castings of plant stems, while the hollows sometimes shelter scraps of clothing.
June Crespo treats printed objects as sculptural and architectural materials that she places in dialogue with the exhibition space, taken not as a constraint but as a partner to the work. The installation Rose trraction is comprised of a large-format, high-definition print of a scan of one of her T-shirts covered with lipstick marks. The artist cultivates a taste for oxymorons: galvanised steel ventilation ducts are veiled with parachute fabric trimmed with lace.
Gestures of tenderness are at the heart of this process, reflected in her way of arranging elements and juxtaposing opposites. Parentescos is a casting of a familiar, personally-significant object, the artist’s grandmother’s travel bag. She is interested in the plasticity of the object: made of soft leather, it can be filled and emptied, expanded and contracted, as if alive, breathing in and out.
She combines and superimposes materials in the same way as the body is made up of layers of tissue, bone and skin. The artist explores qualities like tension (TW, TG), sensuality and sexuality. Some of the hollow pieces resemble orifices that allow the circulation of vital fluids and secretions, like No Osso (Occipital).
But such content is absent; the bodies, sometimes monstrous, unstable and transitory, are empty, open to new possibilities.
With the support of Henri Moore Foundation, ACE, CarrerasMugica, Bilbao and P420, Bologna.
