Ianko's Selection

The expert's selection of artists to buy and collect at RedCollectors

Ianko López writes about art and culture in various media such as El País, ICON, Condé Nast Traveler and Vanity Fair, where he maintains a regular section called Acceso Preferente. He also collects contemporary art to the extent possible. Born in Bilbao, he lives and works in Madrid and has studied Business Administration and Art History. He tries to keep up to date with what is happening in the art scene, visiting exhibitions and keeping in touch with artists and their work.

Credits: Eduardo Sourrouille

Although it may be pleasurable, it is very difficult to choose what we like. And the more difficult it is, the more we learn by doing it. For example, in making this selection I have learned that I am obsessed with the idea that the body is a malleable material that offers almost infinite possibilities, so many that they possibly reside more in our mind than outside of it. That is why, four hundred years ago, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza said that no one has determined what a body can do, and this is still true today, and possibly will never cease to be true. Another thing I have learned is that all the conventions that arise from our mental schemes, and that we project outwards thinking that they are the truth of the world, can and should be questioned, and that art is one of the most effective means of doing so. So I think that all these pieces are important, and that they could all be part of any collection interested in connecting with the world of today (or with the world of always).

RedCollectors by Ianko

MARIA TERESA HINCAPIÉ

Colombian María Teresa Hincapié , who died in 2008, is not very well known in our country, but her work deserves the widest possible dissemination. In her performances she used her body as a utopia of habitability, although habitability is an idea that in itself always has something utopian about it. The photos serve as a record of these performances, some of which took place over many hours, and they partially compensate those of us who were unable to witness them in person.

inma herrera

I really enjoyed the exhibition by Inma Herrera (Madrid, 1986) at the F2 gallery, where several pieces were firmly engraved in my memory. Here, the cement hand modelled on the artist's own, the joints welded using the Japanese kintsugi method, and the copper plate that refers to the technique of engraving, seem to evoke a reflection on artistic authorship and the tactile and visual quality of art.

Miguel Angel Campano

When Campano passed away a little over two years ago, a kind of fever broke out for the recovery of his work, including a retrospective at the Reina Sofía. The exhibition that Juana de Aizpuru is now dedicating to him continues to amaze us with the quality and variety of his work, of which these works are clear examples.

Elena Asins

I have a soft spot for Elena Asins . She was an artist of astonishing acuity and sophistication, but I also find her much less “cold” than is often said. Whether in her sculpture, her paintings or her works on paper, we get a glimpse into the workings of a unique mind, invaded by geometry, music and mathematics. I could stare at these pieces for hours, and then return to them again and again.

Jose Ramon Amondarain

I really enjoyed meeting Amondarain again, an artist who really caught my attention when I first started to get interested in contemporary art, and who I later lost track of (my fault, not his), but who, as far as I can see, is still in great form. The paintings and sculptures he has presented at Cibrián Gallery are magnificent, and they seem to tell us out loud something that we already know but often forget, and that is why it is one of the underlying discourses in almost all works of art: that absolutely nothing is what it seems.

MATTHEW MATÉ

Mateo Maté ’s work on “Domestic Nationalism,” which turns symbols of a nation – flags, coats of arms or maps, for example – into home décor, radiates critical irony. If we can build our own coat of arms with the odds and ends we have at home, why not entrench ourselves in it and consider it our definitive nation?

HAIR AND JAILER

The artist duo Cabello/Carceller have long been dealing with issues that are very topical today, such as personal identity and its connection to the body. Both things are linked, but they are not the same nor do they have a univocal relationship. In these pieces they draw on the work of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, who approached these same concerns from a dissident and combative perspective.

KEPA GARRAZA

The famous portrait of the Spanish King Charles III painted by Anton Mengs is a rare mix of authority and bonhomie. And, like all those of his style, a propaganda image. By faithfully reproducing it in his drawing with perfect technique, as he also does with the Emperor Augustus or the enemy soldiers of the First World War who share cigarettes, Kepa Garraza is not doing an academic exercise, but rather clearly revealing the motivations that motivated the original images.

Andre Roman

Andre Romão also seems particularly interested in the possibilities offered by the human body to reflect on social and political issues, from a perspective that is always poetic, ironic and enigmatic. The reproduction of a wooden hand, a branch and a plexiglass base can be separately elements full of expressive possibilities, but the way he puts them together they refer, in my opinion, to a discourse on “the cultural” and “the natural”, a false dichotomy that is nevertheless engraved in our acquired mental structure.

Teresa Murta

Painting is a kind of battlefield: for many, art is almost always equivalent to painting, and for others it is an “outdated” discipline that should give way to other forms of expression. However, there are artists who, like Teresa Murta , show us that the possibility of doing new things without leaving behind what is traditionally understood as painting is still open, and that it is also possible to represent the unrepresentable.

Carlos Bunga and Primož Bizjak

I have been following and admiring Bunga for a long time. I had never heard of Bizjak . Their joint project “The Cardboard Hospital” brings us closer, from different formal approaches, to a paper architecture that is physical but also made of memory. That is what makes all the pieces that compose it so interesting, apart from their perfect formal resolution.

ARNULF RAINER

The human face is an inexhaustible goldmine. There is no more hypnotic spectacle or artistic material that offers more possibilities. And what Arnulf Rainer did by intervening in these faces – in this case one from a portrait of Nietzsche and another from an engraving by Goya – with his violent and expressive strokes reveals much more about the people portrayed than it hides.

Nora Aurrekoetxea

The first time I was aware of seeing a work by Nora Aurrekoetxea was at the last edition of ARCO, where she also won one of the prizes from the Community of Madrid. In this exhibition for the Juan Silió gallery she presented some very different works that confirmed to me that she is a young artist to follow. The rings in the title (that means “eraztunak” in Basque) abandon their ornamental function and become a utilitarian structure. Or maybe not: in reality what I like most about this project is how mysterious it is, and that is why all possibilities remain open in it.