Jorge Oteiza was a visual artist, who worked from the 1950s until the 2000s in a search for…read moretranscendent secular sacred spaces through abstraction and for-void advocation. His work is well known in Spain (mostly among architects) . He was a convinced Basque nationalist, who used embarrassing pseudo theories to claim the exceptionality and purity of the Basque culture and language, in terms that can be understood as an jntelkectualized and transcendent version of current far right xenofobia. Quite disdainful..
Architecturally, the museum is a renovation and extension of the artist (and his wife Itziar's own studio-house, designed by the brutalist (and later post-modern) Franco-time architect Javier Saenz de Oiza, who collaborated with Oteiza in several projects mostly under the patronage of the Franco-beneficiary Opus Dei affiliated Huarte family.
The architecture is definitively not good for the following reasons:
1. It emptied and sanitized the old studio-house, in what is a historical culture destruction now un reparable. That interior contained the laboratorio de tizas, in coexistence with a peasant-like form of domesticity. That was all destroy to create a vulgar space for projections. Unforgivable.
2. It destroys Oteiza and Itziar's garden. Where sculptures lived alongside trees and plants. All that was lost so that the space of the garden would become a paved shaft between the old buildings and the extension.
3. The museum interior is a real mess, a chaotic succession of pretentious tiny rooms, where the work compete with fire extinction devises, huge unnecessary ramp systems and stairs, constant changes of materials, and an overall dramatic light more likely of a tacky jewelry store that a museum. Awful.
4. Urbanization is the epitome of lack of sensitivity: an awful deployment of a black painted proliferation of walls and platforms, where a sweet landscape layer in the past. Such an accumulation of ugliness.
THE WORK
Despite the far right Basque exceptionality discourse, the collection of sculptures is amazing. Such an exceptional accumulation of beautiful and sensitive masterpieces. Oteiza hardly sold his main works, and therefor most of his work is there as part of this publically-owned collection.
The tizas, the maclas, the metaphysical boxes, the glass experiments that have been admired by those who love Oteiza's work, are all there.
Also his rather conventional incursions in architecture, half way between Adalberto Libera and a primitive Peter Eisenman.
Don't miss it.
