José Zugasti
ARTIST
José Zugasti was born in Eibar, an industrial town that has largely marked the aesthetic uniqueness of his art. After studying Fine Arts in Madrid, Zugasti began to work as an artist in the 1970s, painting urban scenes in the capital and alternating them with more bucolic and coastal landscapes, like the panoramic views of Lekeitio which so many times inspired him. As he entered the 1980s, he put aside his Modiglianesque style prints to fully dedicate his work to Matterism. His object of study then focused on the effects of the passage of time, placing the human figure at the center of his work. His interest in shape and its development in gravitational space began gaining increasingly more presence in his creative process, until he finally reached the cusp of abstraction. The disappearance of mass and the resulting bareness in his lines were to be important foundations in his art’s evolution from that point on. Interested in shapes, he began to extract them from the canvas using wires (a material that he would continue to use for the following decades). In 1984, installed in San Sebastián and in his new workshop in Beraun, he made the final leap, creating his first sculpture, ‘Figura subiendo la escalera’ (‘Figure Climbing the Stairs’), a piece with a tacit influence from Russian Constructivism, from Julio González’s Cubism, in addition to the linear expressionism of Alberto Giacometti’s drawing.
After more than a decade creating sculptures, in 2002 he got his first public piece on the Paseo de la Memoria in Bilbao. The piece,entitled‘a la deriva’(‘adrift’) and made of steel,fits into the surroundings of the Euskalduna Palace, starting with the idea of wire, transforming that idea into 4-cm thick swirls of compact steel to reach a maximum height of 6 meters.‘a la deriva’ was the first of many public pieces that he installed in subsequent years in different Spanish municipalities like Palma de Mallorca, Pinto, Lemoa, Ceutí, San Sebastián, and Salvatierra.the size of the sculpture that he created for his hometown is noteworthy: a piece made up of interwoven steel rings 14 cm thick and with openings large enough for pedestrians to pass through, alluding in the most sensitive of ways to the lack of urban space available in the town.
Simultaneously to the creation of his public pieces, between 1990 and 2010 he exhibited his works uninterruptedly at the Arco Contemporary Art Fair. His art –represented to a large extent by thevanguardia Gallery of Bilbao– has also been exhibited at the Berlin, Cologne, and London Art Fairs. In addition to his participation in individual and group displays and exhibitions, as well as in several retrospective shows, relevant Basque museums own some of his pieces, such as the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum,artium ofvitoria, and the Diocesan and San Telmo Museums in San Sebastián. His works have also been acquired by the Government of the Balearic Islands, the Basque Government, the General Assembly of Biscay, as well as City Halls and private entities such as the Association of Civil Engineers of the Basque Country, Bancaixa ofvalencia and Barcelona, and Kutxabank.
Concepts such as the visual representation of weight and lightness, as well as the fragility and instability of bodies, were key ideas for him in the first decade of the new century. To free oneself from matter, keeping only the bare shape with its essence of straight lines and curves – these were the foundations for the abstract pieces that he would work on subsequently.
A very relevant series of his career has been ‘Estructuras y transparencias’ (‘Structures and Transparencies’), created with wires and sometimes incorporating fragments of plastic and tape, with parts of the structure painted white – aiming to silence space.
The year 2011 marked a turning point in his career, as he suffered a thoracic aortic aneurysm. He survived and, somehow, he was reborn as well. After the operation, he changed his approach, leaving aside the (physically demanding) creation of sculptures and focusing on painting, poetry, and experimenting with video art. Straight lines and curves continue to be the basis of his work – they are also in his videos, as his films are edited using his paintings as a basis.at the same time, he extracts frames from his videos to act as a foundation for some of the pieces he does on paper.as in the prior phase of his career, he once again does away with the closed mass and keeps only what he understands as essential: the shape and its expression in open space. He does so to try to show us the character of nature –the sea, fundamentally–, a metaphor of the human being in the various states between calm and violence. His animated paintings, which start with a solid base, are a breath of fresh air on the Basque cultural scene, where that discipline is rather uncommon. Color makes an appearance in these pieces which feature a dialog between shapes as their protagonist – how could it be otherwise?