The universe of Ignacio Goitia at the Instituto Cervantes in Rome

On September 9, 2020, the exhibition The Universe of Ignacio Goitia reopens to the public at the Sala Dalí of theInstituto Cervantes in Rome. After being staged in Bilbao, the exhibition can be visited in the capital until December 30, 2020, bringing together several of the artist’s works exhibited for the first time in Italy.

Through the careful staging, designed and curated by Goitia himself, a native of Bilbao, the viewer will be able to retrace the different periods and themes he has tackled over the course of 30 years of artistic activity.

Organized by theInstituto Cervantes and Diputación Foral de Bizkaia, the exhibition features paintings, drawings and three-dimensional installations. From his early paintings where the protagonists were giraffes inside a palace, to the series dedicated to colonization and globalization, to theinfluence of the Roman tradition. The latter theme is present in most of Goitia’s works, as the different themes represented in his works are set in architectural buildings built centuries earlier.

The first exhibition space, which can also be seen from the street, is reminiscent of department store windows, only here the artist, instead of displaying commercial items, presents a universe structure: a kind of three-dimensional painting with characters taken from his works, in which the viewer can walk around and be an integral part of the work itself, coming into contact with Goitia’s universe.

From the outside the characters, coming out of the paintings, look three-dimensional, however, walking through the room one discovers that the figures are flat and behind black. The painting itself is transformed into black silhouettes as if it were a Chinese shadow theater, thus tying in with the depictions that decorate the room, drawn by the artist on the occasion of his recent exhibition in Miami.

Thescenic layout of the rooms is intended to give a better understanding of the artist’s universe: the rooms are separated by sheets painted like a kind of “boiserie” (which he designed himself) and lead the viewer into a world where reality and fantasy coexist, as happens in Ignacio Goitia’s own works.

In the paintings dedicated to Basque folklore, by decontextualizing the protagonists and placing them in different European cities, the artist invites the public to reflect on how the ancestral form of expression of a people can be an element to confront globalization.

Hours: Wednesday through Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m.
Free admission.

The universe of Ignacio Goitia at the Instituto Cervantes in Rome

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