Quietly poetic
Spanish sculptor Cristina Iglesias breaks newground with ‘Inner Landscape’
The Earth’s crust appears to have ruptured outside the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s new Kinder Building.
Rivulets of water seep through the exposed fissure of jagged rocks and tangled roots, gaining momentum until a pool forms. The surface catches reflections of the building and nearby live oak trees. Then the pool gradually recedes, and after a few minutes, the cycle begins again.
The drama of Spanish sculptor Cristina Iglesias’ bronze, bas-relief pool takes about 50 minutes to experience fully. “Inner Landscape (the lithosphere, the roots, the water),” as the title suggests, invites contemplation. The sculpture is the star of a new plaza at the building’s Main Street doors.
More conventional bronzes, also newly acquired, sit above water on the building’s other side, facing the Cullen Sculpture Garden. While all the outdoor works are visible now, the building’s doors don’t open to the public until Nov. 21.
Museum officials want the new plaza to be an inviting public place, and it’s hard to imagine a more magnetic sculpture for it than “Inner Land
scape,” which doubles as a ravishing bench.
“The piece seduces the viewer to move and to look from another point; and maybe to wait for something to repeat,” Iglesias said. “My aim is to create places to think, to reflect. That’s been my preoccupation: how to do pieces that deal with the observation, the waiting for something to happen.”
Water creating movement
The only woman among eight elite artists commissioned to create permanent, site-specific works for the museum’s new building, Iglesias came from Madrid to oversee the installation of the massive sculpture. Even after several
years of planning with a team of hydraulic and structural engineers as she constructed drawings, then clay models, then wax casts in several sizes, she could not know exactly how the elements would work together until they were in place and turned on.
Water is, well, slippery material. It emerges 30 ways in “Inner Landscape,” creating movement that’s as important as the static bronze structure whose multitude of forms determine the directional flow. Iglesias wanted to evoke the way water comes and goes around rocks in a tide pool. She speaks of the new sculpture as a thing of illusions but also a thing alive.
On Wednesday, the artist and a crew of more than a half-dozen people were tweaking the water’s
timing. A rigorously calculated system of pipes, valves and drains lies hidden below the bronze segments, which were individually cast and arrived in several truckloads. “It’s a piece that can never be reproduced,” Iglesias said. “There’s not a single cast, or even one of completed parts. We have cast many elements of surfaces. It’s a different way of working.”
While her completed sculpture looks like the result of brute force, Iglesias’ energy is quietly poetic.
“Fountains are always entertaining,” she said. “I like the idea that a fountain can also be inspiring, opening perception to details and the possibility of looking more slowly, taking time, maybe as you wait for someone to meet you there. I like that a
piece can have all this colorful life around it. People can sit on it and look at how the water moves or look at the reflections.”
Fascinated by what’s underground
Light and reflection have always been present in her work. For several decades she has made gates and passages, rooms and mazes, screens, suspended pavilions, walls and corridors whose filigreed structures cast shadows on walls, ceilings and floors. Those vertical works often construct a fictional idea of the outdoors. “The reflection completes the view,” she said.
All sculpture begs to be viewed from multiple angles, but Iglesias’ first major public piece —
2005’s “Deep Fountain” in Antwerp, Belgium — took gazes somewhere new, below the ground plane. “I am fascinated by the underground, thinking about the life under what humans construct — the life under our feet,” she said. “The spectacularity” of her fountains, she explained, is not water shooting up but draining through a fictional bottom.
Although museums worldwide exhibit and collect her sculpture, “Inner Landscape” is Iglesias’ first public artwork in the U.S. Its bronze forms are rockier than her previous ground fountains, with less evidence of vegetation and roots, because it is about the lithosphere, the top crust of the planet, where minerals and metals exist.
“If you look carefully,
you can see the goldish light of the bronze as if it is in the rock,” Iglesias said. “It’s a landscape of an interior, the underground, but also with life breaking through in the water and roots.”
During site visits to Houston, she was taken by the way gnarly live oak roots bust through sidewalks in the Museum District. “I was very inspired by that, thinking about it as a sign of life,” she said. “In the moment we are living, we have to be more aware of taking care of the planet.”
The bronze of “Inner Landscape” is not slick and polished. It’s the color of light mud. This gives you the sense that you have arrived just minutes after the earth broke open, perhaps from the stress of the building’s construction. Yet Iglesias’ sculpture does not argue with Steven Holl’s environmentally engaged architecture. It’s a compliment, anchoring the building’s cloud-inspired roof and porous sensibility with a gesture of earthbound vulnerability.
“No matter what you build on top of the earth, there are fragile zones underneath with water, roots growing and rocks full of minerals that also … create oil and gas,” Iglesias said. “It’s the composition that makes life.”