Maider López
:
Mountain
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Maider Lopez (born 1975 in San Sebastian) is a prominent Basque/Spanish contemporary artist. From the beginning of her career, she has been working in and with public space. Often participatory in character, her interventions address the transformation and appropriation of space as well as its iconography and syntax. She has installed gangplanks leading through the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale and made colorful sun blinds that add surprising highlights to a building façade in Madrid. Maider Lopez also reorganized entire rooms in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and she staged traffic jams on lonely mountain roads.
Project no longer on view
"Mountain" is the title of the work she created in the Schlosspark Grafenegg. It is literally down-to-earth and located somewhere between a criticism of civilization and spirituality, between American Minimal and Land art of the 1960s and ’70s. For her project, a new pond was created, and the dug up earth was used to build two prominent mounds in the otherwise flat terrain. Like Robert Smithson and his Spiral Hill in the Dutch town of Emmden, Maider Lopez also created a path leading to the top. Visitors in the park can walk up the “mountain” and enjoy the views and perspectives from the terraces. Because the landscape is the artistic material, the modulated site is subject to processes of change. Visitors are the tools that complete the work. Lopez’s gentle hills create a space of reflection that focuses not only on a dialogue with visitors, but also on questions of historicity, genius loci, site specificity, and artistic perspectives.
(Brigitte Huck)
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