Wiels | EN

Oier Iruretagoiena (Basque Country - Spain, 1988) lives and works in Bilbao. He started off his creative practice in experimental music before expanding to sculpture, interventions in the public space and text. He uses readily available materials and mediums, leaving evidence of the process and of the inner material composition of the works in the final result. His work accrues various layers of meaning and references touching on recurring interests which range from rural and religious imaginaries to dystopias, and it is also characterized by a search for the discordances produced in the ambivalence of ironic distance.

He graduated with a BA in Fine Art from UPV-EHU in 2011, including an exchange with Universitat de Barcelona, and in 2018 he took part in the WIELS residency programme in Brussels. He has had solo shows at CarrerasMugica gallery in Bilbao (2023, 2019 and 2015), at Ana Mas Projects gallery in Barcelona (2022), at San Telmo Museum in Donostia-San Sebastián (2021), and at the Halfhouse space in Barcelona (2014), among others. He has also exhibited his work in various group shows: “The Point of Sculpture” at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (2021), “Generación 2020” at La Casa Encendida in Madrid (2020), “Le Petit Cercle Bruxellois” at Institut de Carton in Brussels (2019), “Bi Dos Two” at Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao (2018), “Cale, cale, cale! Caale!!!” at Tabakalera in Donostia-San Sebastián (2017), and “Otzan” at Galería Elba Benítez in Madrid (2016). In addition, from 2011 to 2020 he was one of the coordinators of Club Le Larraskito in Bilbao, and from 2020 to 2023 he wrote a column for the basque newspaper Berria.

“My reading normally tends towards essays, and in recent years I have come across books that included double axis diagrams, graphically representing certain contents. They were essays by Carlo M. Cipolla, Michel Serres and Viktor E. Frankl

Carlo M. Cipolla, Italian historian, presented his graph in a humorous essay called The Basic laws of Human Stupidity, which was initially circulated solely among friends, but ended up being published widely and translated into several languages. The graph represents how the interaction between two people is based on the naivety, intelligence, stupidity or evil of both parties. It is obviously an ironic proposal, because the complexity of human relations cannot be reduced to such a simple scheme.

Michel Serres also uses irony in Le Parasite. Among other things, parasite designates the interferences or noises that occur in telecommunications, and he uses this meaning to exemplify the difficulty of communication between two people. Something is always lost between speaker 1 and speaker 2, because «in order to hear the message alone, one would have to be identical to the sender».

Viktor E. Frankl doesn´t speak directly about human relations, but does so about the meaning of life, what would be found, he asks, in something or someone beyond oneself. Among the several graphical schemes he used in his texts, the image employed here shows a sinusoidal curve hidden between two planes, that wouldn´t be visible from all points of view.

The diagrams could have been more, or from other authors. As well as sharing both axes, what unifies the three of them is having come across my path, in a non premeditated derivative that ends up reflecting the conductive line of my interests. These readings have been one work material more in the studio, marking the reference point for the group of objects and drawings that are here presented.”

- Oier Iruretagoiena