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8/10/2008

Josune Amunarriz

Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, New York

Curator: Dr Barbara Rose

Organized by Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, the Galería Salvador Díaz in Madrid and the Government of the Basque Region in collaboration with SEACEX.

This exhibition of two major installations by Josune Amunarriz will introduce the American public to the unique art of the only Basque woman painter working in monumental dimensions and three-dimensional installations. The opportunity to show these works within the international context to which they belong will help both the artist as well as the image of Basque artists in general because they will be seen by the influential New York press which forms the world opinion. This is essential since the American public has no concept of the artistic legacy of the Basque Country. This is due in large part to the vast publicity surrounding the Guggenheim Bilbao which is thought of as an extension of the American Guggenheim and not as a Basque museum.

Amunarriz was trained as a mural painter, but her most recent works are installations in which images begin to break apart, bursting the conventional limits of the frame and the wall to reach out into real space. Her work will have special appeal to the American public because of this large scale and the relationship of her installations to architecture, both primary issues in the American context. More so than a European audience, the American public is particularly focused on the issue of women in art, which assures a widespread response to Amunarriz’s ability to engage with the cutting edge issues of advanced abstract art while maintaining individuality and creating a highly individualistic style.

The exhibition will consist of two major installations which will fill the two exhibition spaces of Queen Sofia Spanish Institute: Glacial, and a new installation designed specifically for the New York show.

The environmental quality of her recent paintings has now become dominant in a new installation, Edad de Hielo (Ice Age) that recalls the glacial forms and colors of the Arctic. Like her other works, it is dramatic, enveloping, and suggestive, and as is all her imagery, linked to the movement of the sea.

Born in the Basque coastal town of Fuentarrabia, Amunarriz spent her childhood with the sea literally at her feet. Her broad gesture brush strokes are characteristically wavy rather than linear or structural in the sense of Cezanne, for example. Her modernist sources are not Cubist but Impressionist and it is not solid forms that attract her but rather atmospheric effects, currents of air or energy that cause waves to ripple and crash on a rocky coast. Although the sea is her inspiration, there is nothing literal in her interpretation of its movement and alternating moments of tempest and calm. Yet this consistent interest in atmospheric effects and high drama characterize her as a romantic, which in today’s cold conceptual climate seems an anachronism. There is no irony or camouflage in her work: it is bold, direct and uncompromising.

There is also little in her work to relate it to modern Spanish painting. On the other hand, even if it is coincidental, there is a locking together of shapes on a plane that reminds me of the American painter Clyfford Still, whose abstractions were rooted in a vision of nature. Like Still and the other artists of the New York School, Amunarriz gives us no horizon line to provide orientation. Instead she plunges us directly into her maelstrom of surf and stone, reducing the distance between the spectator and the painted image. In her most recent work, she eliminates that distance entirely. We have no choice but to pay attention because she has created a situation that literally engulfs us.

It is this need to address the viewer more directly that was the impulse behind the very large formats of American artists. They did not want to decorate bourgeois interiors but to make art for public spaces. Mural painting of course is public art by definition, and Amunarriz’s choice of working in very large formats expresses a desire to create powerful images that are literally larger than life. At the same time it also avoids the confines that modern art suffers in its necessity to become domesticated in order to be consumed. She resists, and this resistance in itself becomes part of the content of the work. Looking at these huge impressive canvases, one remembers Hans Hofmann’s comment to Lee Krasner on seeing one of her works: “This is so good you would not know it was done by a woman.” Today, such a statement would seem not only politically incorrect but also irrelevant. Nevertheless there is something striking about a woman who paints in a muscular, athletic style that lacks all coquetry and who demands to stake out her own territory in her own terms.

Queen Sofía Spanish Institute
684 Park Avenue NY 10021 New York
Gallery Hours:
Monday - Thursday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.; Friday 10 a.m. - 8 p.m.; Saturday 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Admission: $5 for the general public and $3 for students and senior citizens

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