20th-21st century. Spanish

One of the most influential contemporary sculptors of the moment, Pello Irazu is an innovator of twentieth-century Basque sculpture, whose works push back the boundaries of architecture, sculpture, painting and drawing.

Born in Andoain in 1963, the artist enrolled in Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country in 1981, from which he graduated with a major in Sculpture in 1986.

His earliest works were strongly indebted to Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003), both in spatial configuration and in the use of industrial materials. At his beginnings as an artist in the Basque Country, Irazu created a series of small-format photographs that provide an interesting testimony of his earliest inspirations, which, besides the aforementioned Oteiza, included , and the work of Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). Pello Irazu took these photographs at the studio in Muelle de Uribitarte he shared with other Basque artists like Ángel Bados (1945) and Darío Urzay (1958).

He spent a year in London in 1989, and in 1990 thanks to a Fulbright scholarship he moved to New York, where he remained for almost a decade. The move was also goaded by a perceived need to distance himself from the places he already knew, and to find new settings that could provide new sources of inspiration for his work. It would be in New York where his practice underwent a material change. This was when he started to incorporate more modest and mundane materials, a change that profoundly altered the appearance of his works. Apart from using everyday domestic objects, he began to employ painting as a skin covering his sculptures, thus endowing them with a new visual meaning.

The time spent in New York proved to be critical for Irazu. Besides instigating a change in his work, it put him in touch with key artworld players, like the gallerist John Weber, a driving force behind , and minimal and post-minimal sculpture, who represented major artists who were then exploring the visual and conceptual boundaries of contemporary art, like Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), Richard Long (1945) and Mario Merz (1925-2003), among others.

In 1998 he returned to Bilbao and as from 2000, his work entered a new phase. Through works with highly redolent shapes, he questioned the signs around us. He supressed all kinds of pedestals, making the works invade the space reserved for the public, inviting the spectator to interact directly with the work. During this period painting continued playing a significant role in his practice, though now focused on mural painting and overstepping the limits of sculpture to become a mediator in the relationship between the work and the beholder.

In recent years, Pello Irazu has engaged in a reflection on new technologies with works that comment on the notion of the representation of sculpture through copying processes.

Pello Irazu’s works are included in the collections of institutions of the stature of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Artium (Vitoria) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (La Jolla).