Navarro Baldeweg | Doing and Chance

Description

Juan Navarro Baldeweg’s extensive oeuvre encompasses a variety of intertwined expressive media, such as painting, sculpture, architecture and installations. Taken individually, the work carried out in each of these areas since the 1960s is highly diverse and has its own specificity, but taken as a whole, it demonstrates certain common generative principles that connect them. The ideas they reflect, or the ways of doing that they suggest, derive from their relationship to known dimensions of the natural world, such as gravity, light or energy and information flows, and from references derived from the active participation of the human body in the work of art, especially in terms of the visual horizon and the gestural expressiveness of the hand; but they also point to universal behaviours in physical processes of action that lay bare the inevitable reciprocity that exists in the world between energy consumption and expenditure, between creating or constructing and destroying by creating.

What makes this series of works so peculiar is his persistence, the way he uses the articulation of these endless lines or threads as a recurring creative strategy. Navarro Baldeweg’s development of these essential themes, which he identified from an early age, has allowed him to deploy a unifying way of thinking, a complex conceptual and expressive alphabet capable of grouping works in different media within a system of coordinates, a common structure, a single primordial room, a primitive hut.

This exhibition highlights the fundamental role of painting: the creative experience of a work that combines action and chance; a task that accepts its encounter with the unexpected, guided by an endless end, that is, a disinterested expectation or an undefined objective. The exhibition presents paintings and works in other expressive media that reveal the creative journeys on the board that unites them, a place that can be traversed precisely along the avenues of its common constituent principles.

Juan Navarro Baldeweg (Santander, 1939)
Active in a wide range of expressive creative fields, he has built up a unique body of work whose originality is recognised throughout the world. This intense activity, full of correlations and nuances, reveals his determination and desire to explore the different artistic genres as a continuum, from the most traditional – painting, sculpture and architecture – to other more contemporary genres. His work has received many awards, including the National Prize for Plastic Arts (1990), the Heinrich Tessenow Gold Medal (1998), the Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (2001), the Gold Medal for Fine Arts (2007), the Gold Medal of the Higher Council of Architects Associations in Spain (2008), the Career Achievement Award at the 8th Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (2012), the Italian National Architecture Award for the Hertziana Library in Rome (2012), the Spanish Architecture Award (2014) and the Medal of Honour of the Menéndez Pelayo International University (2019).

His work is exhibited in numerous museums and collections worldwide, including: MNCARS (Madrid), Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Architecture Museum of the Technical University of Munich, Getty Villa (Los Angeles, California), the Museum of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Madrid), the Bank of Spain Collection (Madrid), the Museum of the Juan March Foundation (Palma de Mallorca), the Lafuente Archive (Cantabria), the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia), the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art (Santiago de Compostela), the Contemporary Art Collection of the Patio Herreriano Museum (Valladolid), the Botín Centre (Santander), the Santander Fine Arts Museum, the BBVA Collection, the Spanish National Library (Madrid), the Arabako Arte Ederren Museoa (Vitoria), the Enaire Collection (Madrid), the Bancaja Foundation (Valencia), the Contemporary Art Collection of the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Navigation of Cantabria (Santander), the Northern Collection of Contemporary Art of the Government of Cantabria (Santander), the Helga de Alvear Collection (Madrid), the Pilar Citoler Collection (Madrid) and the José Luis Tranche Foundation (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria).

His work and texts have been published in numerous monographs such as Navarro Baldeweg (Tanais, 2001), Juan Navarro Baldeweg. Le opere, gli scritti, la critica (Electa, 2012), Juan Navarro Baldeweg. A Zodiac (ICO Foundation, 2013) and Juan Navarro Baldeweg. Genesis of an Artistic Zodiac (Ministry of Development, 2016), and Juan Navarro Baldeweg. Writings (Pre-textos, 2017).

Ignacio Moreno, curator
He is an architect (1992) with a Doctorate in Architecture from the Madrid Polytechnic University (2004). Since 2007 he has worked as a conservation architect for the Senate of Spain. He has combined his professional activity with teaching as Professor of Architectural Projects at the School of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Zaragoza (2015-2022) and at the IE Higher Technical School of Integrated Architecture Studies in Segovia (2008-2014).

An expert on the work of Juan Navarro Baldeweg, he has collaborated since 1992 on projects, publications and exhibitions of his work, as well as on the documentary research and selection of material for the latest monographs on his architecture, published by Tanais Ediciones (2001) and Electa Mondadori (2012). He is the author of the book Mental Drawings. Principles of the Creative Universe of Juan Navarro Baldeweg (Dibujos Mentales. Principios del Universo creativo de Juan Navarro Baldeweg) - (2017), and of numerous articles and conference papers on the artistic experience of Navarro Baldeweg in relation to his architecture, published in Spanish and international magazines, such as Formas, Zarch or Casabella, among others.

He collaborated with the Juan March Foundation in Madrid in the research and selection of Navarro Baldeweg’s works for the exhibition Listening with the Eyes. Sound Art in Spain 1961-2016 (Escuchar con los ojos. Arte Sonoro en España 1961-2016) - (2017). Curator of the exhibition Navarro Baldeweg. Anelli di uno Zodiaco, at Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro in Venice (2018). He delivered the laudatio for Juan Navarro Baldeweg on the occasion of the bestowal of the Medal of Honour of the Menéndez Pelayo International University (2019).

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