Sergio Prego
Spain, 1969
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Sergio Prego (Hondarribia, Spain, 1969) experiments with the notion of the sculptural by expanding the concept of sculpture in space and extending its relationship with the body. Prego forms part of a generation of artists from the sculptural tradition from the late nineties that recognises the importance of performativity when it comes to creating meaning and context in a work of art. He sees the components of sculpture as movement, its relationship with the context and its location in space; and he incorporates the body as a key vector through which space can be understood, and vice versa. Technology becomes a key tool for setting up his stages. With Tetsuo, Bound to Fail (1998) he began a series of works including Home (2001), Recoil (2002) and Black Monday (2008), which use a set of cameras arranged in a circle to simultaneously capture an event (the body of the leaping artist, a pink liquid running out of his mouth, an explosion). The photographs are then edited into a video to produce a centripetal vision of the frozen act: perspective is multiplied and the traditional notions of space-time are suspended. This concern for revealing and negotiating the limits of spatial experience can also be seen in Yesland, I’m here to stay (2001), in which the artist walks on the roofs and walls of a reconstruction of ”la Caixa” Foundation’s Sala Montcada exhibition space, and in Cowboy Inertia Creeps (2003), where we see the artist crawling along urban structures in different cities. In recent years, Prego’s artistic leanings have led him to develop pneumatic architectures made out of translucent materials that invade the exhibition space and invite visitors to explore inside them. When walking through the installation, the insides of the installation and exhibition space merge, questioning the relationship with the architectural context and the materiality of the object. Sergio Prego graduated in fine art from the University of the Basque Country and has lived in New York for over 10 years, where he was the only artist in a group of engineers and architects at Vito Acconci’s studio. In 2012 he won the Gure Artea Prize in recognition of his creative work.
Julia Morandeira