The Museo Universidad de Navarra presented this Wednesday the exhibition Menhires by Elena Asins, which can be visited until March 2019. The meeting was attended by Jaime García del Barrio, general director of the Museum, and Rafael Levenfeld, artistic director.

In his speech, García del Barrio stressed the special character that this exhibition has for the center, given the artist's close professional and personal relationship with the Museum. "She was a regular at everything we did at the Museum and, with the authenticity that characterized her, she conveyed her opinions to us. She was very enthusiastic about everything that the Museum meant for Navarre and for all those interested in art.

For his part, Levenfeld has defined Asins as a "very brave figure since she started working in the art scene in the 60s. She went against the current, interested in concrete poetry and geometric abstraction". She was also a pioneer in the use of technology in the service of art.

The artistic director also recalled the work the Museum was doing with Elena Asins when the artist passed away in 2015. "One of the things Elena would have liked most is that someone had commissioned her to design a city. She said that all the cities in the West had a point of energy, but they were unbalanced. She was talking about a city in balance". This is how the project The Democratic City began to take shape, based on a metal model that the artist had in her home. The project remained unfinished.

Now, the Museum has presented a new project, under the title Menhirs, which brings the viewer closer to the artist's search for an exact and true art, formulated from the beauty of mathematics.

TIME AND MOTION

The exhibition revolves around Menhires, a sculptural piece from 1995, which the artist donated to the Museum in 2014 and since then has been part of the Collection. It consists of 40 monoliths, each of which is composed of a quadrangular prism that acts as a base for a truncated black lacquered cube.

The variations produced by exploring the turning possibilities of the lacquered figure evoke the poetic capacity of these exact figures in movement. Asins emphasized that the key to this installation was precisely the relationship between the various pieces, which defines a given space and establishes a sequence. This could be translated into a mathematical formula, due to the rotation of the position of the cut.

 

PAINTINGS AND ARTIST'S PORTFOLIOS

The exhibition also includes a series of paintings (tempera on wood and paper) that appear as a flat representation of the same geometric idea (the square sectioned by one of its sides), with a certain sequence. These have been loaned by the Freijo Gallery, whose gallery owner, Angustia Freijo, was present at the presentation to the media. The exhibition also includes a selection of a series of artist's portfolios in which geometric exploration can be observed.

THE ARTIST

Elena Asins was a visual artist, writer, lecturer and art critic. She based her plastic language on the systematic calculation based on computers. She was one of the first Spanish artists to use technology as an ally of art. Elena Asins' work is part of private and public collections, such as the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, the Instituto de Valenciano de Arte Moderno and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, among others. In 2006 he received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts from the Government of Spain and in 2011 the National Plastic Arts Award. At the time of her death, the artist was carrying out a project with the Museum that she left unfinished.