Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB presents Eva Lootz Discursos de agua, on view through 16 September 2012.
The Austrian artist and Spanish resident Eva Lootz (b. 1940, Vienna), awarded the National Plastic Arts Award in 1994, has lived and worked in Spain for the last 47 years. During this period she has become one of the most relevant figures within the Spanish artistic field as well as a prominent reference point for conceptual avant-garde movements.
Eva Lootz, exhibition at Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB.
Lootz’s work is characterised by the use of a wide range of artistic languages and materials: sculpture, installation, drawing, engraving, photography, sound, and video as well as one main concern that traces the intimate relation between matter and language from different angles. Her work pursues a reflection on human intervention in nature and questions the role of progress as the driving force in history.
In her proposal for the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB, Lootz continues to develop the Hidrografí project, an idea on which she has worked since 2005. Taking the rivers of the Iberian Peninsula as the main characters, she establishes a relation between the capillary system and the hydrographical basins and proposes an indirect way of representing landscapes through pieces halfway between art and technology.
Related to this are a series of sculptures in marble that have to be highlighted. She creates them from a three-dimensional model she obtains by computer-processing parameters—such as floods, variations in the volume, and changes in river flow—and with which she aims to make visible the different temporary sequences in the evolution of Spanish river beds.
Next to them, several light boxes created from hydrographical maps that seem to draw the basins in the air stress the idea of the continued transformation experienced by rivers, seen as living beings by the artist. At the same time, a set of panels represent the direction of rainfall in each part of the land, depending on the topography, by means of chromatic codes.
Photographs, diagrams, and videos, among other elements, explore issues such as the influence of rivers in the development of urban centers, hydraulic politics, and the risks associated with the water business—issues that are highlighted by explicit messages distributed all over the room and through which Lootz shares her concerns about water shortages in the world, and the irresponsible use of hydraulic resources, with the viewer, sometimes in a poetic way, at other times in a harsh and direct manner.
Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
Calle Saldaña s/n
09003 Burgos, Spain
www.cabdeburgos.com