Galería Tomás March is proud to present the exhibition “Ilbehera” by Manu Muniategiandikoetxea (Bergara, 1966). This is his third exhibition in Valencia, following shows in My Name’s Lolita Art in 2000 and 2003. He has also exhibited in many other galleries and museums in Spain including Espacio Mínimo Madrid, in Art Basel Miami Beach 2004, Sala Rekalde (Bilbao), Galería Palma Doze (Villafranca del Penedés, Barcelona), Trinta (Santiago de Compostela), Centro de Arte Santa Mónica (Barcelona), Galería DV (San Sebastián), etc.

His work is included in many major Spanish collections like Altadis, L’Oreal, Caja Madrid, Banco de España, Coca Cola, Museo Artium, Unión Fenosa, City Council of Pamplona, etc.“Conscious of the difficulty which painting faces when competing with other media in the
construction of an effective dialogue with the real world, Manu Muniategiandikoetxea has been progressively building, from the stance of a painter, a series of extraordinarily flexible strategies in which he demonstrates that this medium is capable of sustaining a continual renewal of its discursive potentiality. First of all, he opts for exploring what is foreign to this medium: real space; and he does so by exploding the plane and expanding the pictorial practice, redirecting it towards a spatial deployment through the elaboration of structures that escape the idea of representation and are transformed into objects.
The primary consequence of this slippage is that an interpretation of his drawings, paintings and sculptures can only be addressed as an indissoluble whole, as different states of the same question. This then suggests an understanding of the sequential process where one single form, one single element, appears again and again—like in a play of mirrors—from the plane to the space, from the small format to an enormous scale that even opens up to the interior, from the drawing to its objectual correspondence or, even, that it might be this very presence in space which is also transformed into an exploration of the plane. Muniategiandikoetxea deploys a whole visual and conceptual machinery that functions like a test ground in which some pieces offer continuity in others, where some resolutions find support in others and each work takes on the dimension of an element in an permanently unfinished process. In much the same way, he co-opts citations and references to the history of art—with artists ranging from Basque sculptors to Russian constructivists, especially Oteiza and Ibarrola, Rodchenko and Popova, or more contemporary names like Nauman and Kippenberger—and he builds bridges with other art languages—literature, film, photography and comic—or allows aspects of subjectivity and experience of the everyday to become the raw material that feeds and expands his work.”

ALICIA MURRÍA