( ) -Aire que yo respiro-
The work of Núria Fuster is not unfamiliar to audiences in Valladolid. She has a significant presence in the Asociación Colección Arte Contemporáneo, and through it her works have been featured in several exhibitions drawn from these holdings at the Museum. She also played a particularly important role in an exhibition that brought considerable visibility to our institution: the survey of sculpture in Spain titled Una dimensión ulterior, held in our galleries in the summer of 2019. Our approach to Núria’s work, with a view to developing a specific project in our most emblematic space—the Chapel of the Counts of Fuensaldaña—therefore feels especially fitting.
Fuster, who has lived in Berlin for many years, focuses her attention on two key concerns: the search for new expressive possibilities in materials and the relationship they establish with the body. As a result, the dynamic potential of her practice is especially evident. The artist has a deep understanding of tradition, where figures such as Rebecca Horn and Jean Tinguely emerge—artists who emphasized the malleability of matter and the choreography of bodies. These references, among many others, run through her work and continue to resonate today. With them in mind, she has conceived her intervention in the Chapel as a large body-form rising at the center of the space.
At first, it appears contained within a succinct, industrial, prismatic structure—an element consistently present in her work—but it soon becomes clear that this form is far from inert, displaying unmistakable vital signs. Air itself becomes material, giving rise to the title (* *) – The Air I Breathe, which Fuster adopts from a clear intention to breathe life into her sculptures, transforming them into bodies that, like her own, breathe.
Also present here is the influence of her experience of nature—both her own and that of various authors, some of them from Castile, to whom she has turned following the invitation to work with our institution. Air, Fuster tells us, is not the negative of things; rather, it is the binding space that enables their coexistence. Air carries with it a political dimension: it allows bodies to be and to exist, granting them the possibility of occupying social space together. It is within this space that the aesthetic inquiry proposed by the artist also seeks to breathe, to exist, and thus to contribute.
A different group of works occupies Gallery 9. These pieces possess a kinetic quality and a certain anthropomorphic inclination. Everyday elements, activated by electronic devices, generate a poetic effect—celebrating what technology and the mundane can create together. This produces a kind of performativity that takes on a singular resonance within the historical context in which it is presented.