It’s a familiar sight – countless construction cranes in the big cities. Urban development is advancing inexorably and rapidly, and it seems to be almost unstoppable. Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui (b. 1972) takes a critical view of the phenomenon. She questions the scale of the comprehensive urban redesign processes that are taking place and investigates the complex relationships between building materials, construction and the decay of the built world.
Since the mid-1990s, the artist, who lives in Rotterdam, has been collecting information on the history of buildings and peripheral areas, on their geo- graphic and urban-planning context and also on the ecological and eco- nomic conditions underlying them. She carries out research on the compo- nents and building materials used. The topics that Almarcegui addresses always have the greatest possible current relevance: the artist makes it clear that the world of built and manufactured materials can never be separated from political,...economic and ecological changes.
Lara Almarcegui became internationally known by deliberately contrasting excessive urban design with formless elements – for example, by taking stock of the construction materials used to build a house and heaping piles of these materials inside the building. In other projects, she has engaged with temporarily unused zones, and has calculated and listed the weight of the building materials used for a building or even for an entire city. In works of this type, Almarcegui creates a commentary on our overplanned and built world, without having to shape it herself: “I am looking for a way of talking about architecture without using images.” She achieves this through a specific approach in which – like a scientist – she first carries out meticu- lous research and brings together a dense complex of facts.
In the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, special attention is now being given for the first time to the role of her drawings, photographs, newspaper cuttings and statistics. They provide a new and unexpected insight into her oeuvre. These works make Almarcegui’s process based approach superbly comprehensible and also allow a large selection of her projects to be expe- rienced afresh. With this focus on paper, the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich is expanding our view of the work of this important artist and at the same time presenting a previously less-known area of her work.
Entrada actualizada el el 21 ago de 2023
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