The sculptor and architect from Pamplona, Alberto Odériz, has created an artistic intervention for the Cidade da Cultura that explores the relationship between it and Mount Gaiás, based on the analysis of the deconstructive methodology applied by Peter Eisenman to both in his architectural project.
Odériz tries to follow the inverse path traced by the American architect, in search of the primitive action (DIVIDE), in the original material (GRANITE) and on a foundational scale (The HUMAN) with the aim of introducing visitors to the experience of crossing the interior of a mountain.
In this way, the sculpture proposes a dialogue with the conceptual strategy of the Cidade da Cultura but with its own scale, material and experience.
The protagonist material is Galician granite and the main work is carried out on it in the quarries: the successive division of the natural rock. All the complexity of Eisenman's project on Mount Gaiás, on Santiago de Compostela and on Galicia concentrated in a single simple gesture: splitting a granite rock.
In developing this proposal, Odériz was very much aware of the response given by the sculptor Richard Serra with his sculptures at the Guggenheim: a content that responds to the conditions of the room, the city and the museum but which seeks a geography and a space of its own through the insertion of the public in a scale and a new materiality.
- Artist: Alberto Odériz
Alberto Odériz (Pamplona, 1983) is an architect from the ETSA in Barcelona and holds a master's degree in Analysis, Theory and History of Architecture and the City from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, with a thesis on the destruction of public space in the Mexican capital. Since 2010 he has lived between Navarra and Mexico, where he combines his work as a sculptor with other disciplines such as urban planning and teaching (professor of the research seminar in the Masters in Housing and the City at CENTRO-Mexico).
He has exhibited his work in Spain (Museo de Navarra, Centro Huarte, Galería Noreste, ARCO) and in Mexico (Centro Cultural de España en México, UNAM, PROYECTOR or the MACO fair, among others).
Recently, she made sculpture works around the theme of the "Inexplicable rock", exploring with the methodology of archaeology the different events of the present that due to their tragic condition (the 2017 earthquake in Mexico), contesting (the demonstrations against feminicides in 2019-2020) or simply due to their insignificance (the first actions of a girl nothing in 2019) were not foreseen to be preserved.
In 2023 it won the Emerging Art Award at the ARCO Fair in Madrid.
- Curator: Chus Villar
Chus Villar is a graduate in Art History, founder and director of Galería Nordés since December 2017 (Santiago de Compostela). Previously, she developed most of her professional career at Galería Trinta, also in Compostela, where she held the positions of assistant, general manager and finally director. She has participated in the programming, management and organisation of more than one hundred exhibitions of international artists, as well as taking part in other projects such as seminars, fairs, etc.
In her work as a curator, her work with the writer Juan Bonilla on the first retrospective exhibition of the photographer Baldomero Pestana (19717-2015) stands out. Baldomero Pestana. La verdad entre las manos was inaugurated in February 2018 at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid and then went on to the Museo Centro Gaiás de la Cidade da Cultura and the Instituto Cervantes in Paris.
Since March 2019 she has also been president of Contemporánea, the Galician Association of Contemporary Art Galleries.
