San Sebastián,
The Kutxa Fundazioa Kubo Sala de San Sebastián began the year of its twenty -fifth anniversary with a sample of the informal and abstract painter María Paz Jiménez, Valladolid of birth but resident much of her career in that Basque city, and continues it with another exhibition of the avile eighty.
“Weave the ephemeral: textures, repetition, geometry, circularity” reviews, under the police station of Leire Vergara, the evolution of its production over four decades attending to its various forms of approach to the fibers: from their attempts to present the structure of the fabrics on photosensitive films to their numerous works derived from the intertwining of vegetable threads in small or medium -sized tissues For the deployment of sculptures devised with these materials, which have implied, in some cases, their immersion in philosophical or political issues, the ideation of different imaginary. Never, throughout this period, has put aside the use of these supports, even when they were relegated in the exhibition scene against disciplines considered more strictly contemporary.
They are half a hundred their compositions gathered now in San Sebastián, between properly textile works, preparatory models of their larger creations and acetate plots. The most recent pieces date from 2023 and each other are accompanied by documentation that accounts for their steps: notebooks, sketches, photographs and catalogs.
María Cueto came to join a brief and select tradition of creators who cultivated textile art from the sixties and seventy, in order to contribute texture to their exhibition proposals and to favor in the public the development of a tactile and not only visual sensitivity. They claimed, ultimately, those authors (Grau-Garriga, Aurèlia Muñoz) the consideration of the fiber as a contemporary material.
After the conceptual and aesthetic footprints of that generation, this Asturian artist began, whose first works were macramé objects that responded to everyday functionalities but that had very rarely prepared in that way: a belt, a hair tape, some earrings and a pitillera. When carrying them out, he could study the mechanics of the knot, the variations of composition that arose during the manual processes and the skill of the hands on the road, so that in a first glance they could seem to us.
Cueto could benefit from the nineties of a stay in Arteleku that allowed him to meet established artists and his time and also enter other techniques, such as screen printing. Approximately since that period their fiber creations will be based on slowness and experimentation: in the generation of warp and plots from different elements.
When the crafts lost ground, she docked in the natural fibers, in the use of a raw matter that connected it with popular and almost ancestral pieces, gradually two -dimensional. The series Interior reading (1992-1995), Plant memory (1993-2000) and Reeds of memory (1994-2002) refer precisely to the plant origin of the material: the first one connects with the graph by following the trace of the stroke left by the intertwined fibers and took sampling book.
Contemporary, in the early nineties, he carried out Lamp fabric (1993), from purposes to a functional and experimental time (sift the light and explore the shadows that derive from the latter) and then, Textile tissue plot for lamp (1996), which contains with delicacy the light structure of the textile object.
As to Plant memorysupposed one of the first materializations of his work on the big scales and thinking about it to be contemplated in space, even crossed by lights that give rise to contrasts and shadows, suggestive in turn of dynamism and temporal effects. For its part, in Reeds of memory We attend the transition from a two -dimensional woven structure to a three -dimensional disposition, out of need more light.
In that same path he has continued to delve since 2000, trying to incorporate volume and evolve towards the concept of Site-Specific, for his possible greater impact on the viewer. So, Dream Tree (2004) and Gaia: Air Purple (2006) project shadow -shaped texture on the environment where they are exhibited, while we are offered as volumetric compositions.
Since then he has continued working in two directions: one based on formal experimentation and the other on the urgency of projecting critical images or messages through form. His constant adoption of plant matter, in addition, gives him a first hour positioning regarding ecological issues.
Sometimes it uses geometries of abstract roots, but by containing these vegetable organic elements, the artist seems to claim a more fluid relationship between science and creation.
María Cueto. “Weave the ephemeral: textures, repetition, geometry, circularity”
Kutxa Fundazioa
Mikeletegi Pasalekua, 81
San Sebastián
From June 20 to September 28, 2025
