Ianko's Selection

The expert's selection of artists for Buy and collecting at RedCollectors

Ianko López writes about art and culture in different media such as El País, ICON, Condé Nast Traveler or Vanity Fair, where he has a regular section called Acceso Preferente. He also collects contemporary art, as far as he can. Born in Bilbao, he lives and works in Madrid and has studied Business Administration and Art History. He tries to keep abreast of 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 between 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 by the idea that the body is a malleable material that offers almost infinite possibilities, so many that possibly reside more in our mind than outside it. That is why, four hundred years ago, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza said that no one has ever determined what a body can do, and this is still true today, and may never cease to be true. Another thing I have learned is that all the conventions that arise from our mental schemas, 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 to do 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 the world of always).

RedCollectors by Ianko

MARIA TERESA HINCAPIÉ

The Colombian María Teresa Hincapié, who died in 2008, is not very well known in our country, and yet her work deserves the maximum diffusion. 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 partly compensate those of us who were unable to witness them live at the time.

inma herrera

I really liked the exhibition of Inma Herrera (Madrid, 1986) at the F2 gallery, in which several pieces were firmly engraved in my memory. Here the cement hand modeled after the artist's own, the joints soldered with the Japanese kintsugi method, and the copper plate that refers to the technique of Print, seem to evoke a reflection on artistic authorship and the tactile and visual quality of art.

MIGUEL ÁNGEL CAMPANO

When Campano passed away a little over two years ago, a kind of fever for the recovery of his work was unleashed, 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 sculptural work, her paintings or her works on paper, we get a glimpse into the workings of a unique mind, pervaded by geometry, music and mathematics. I could stare at these pieces for hours, and then return to them again and again.

josé ramón amondarain

I was very pleased to meet Amondarain again, an artist who caught my attention when I first became interested in contemporary art, whom I later lost track of (my fault, not his), but who I can see is still on top form. The paintings and sculptures he has presented at Cibrián Gallery are magnificent, and seem to tell us out loud something we already know but often forget, and which is therefore one of the underlying discourses in almost all works of art: that absolutely nothing is what it seems.

MATTHEW MATÉ

Mateo Maté 's work in "Domestic Nationalism", which turns the symbols of a nation - flags, coats of arms or maps, for example - into home decorations, radiates critical irony. If we can build our own coat of arms with the junk we have around the house, why not entrench ourselves in it and consider it our ultimate nation?

CABELLO Y CARCELLER

The artist duo Cabello/Carceller have been dealing for a long time with issues that are now very topical, such as personal identity and its link with the body. Both are linked, but they are not the same thing, nor are they univocally related. In these pieces, part of the work of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, who approached these same concerns from a dissident and combative approach.

KEPA GARRAZA

Anton Mengs's famous portrait of the Spanish King Charles III is a rare mixture of authority and bonhomie. And, like all those of his style, it is a propagandistic image. By faithfully reproducing it in his drawing with a perfect technique, as he also does with the Emperor Augustus or the enemy soldiers of the First World War who share cigarettes, Kepa Garraza does not perform an academic exercise, but cleanly reveals the springs that motivated the original images.

Andre Romão

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 hand in wood, a branch and a plexiglass base may be separately elements full of expressive possibilities, but as 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 people art is almost always equivalent to painting, and for others it is an "outmoded" discipline that should give way to other forms of expression. However, there are artists like Teresa Murta who show us that it is still possible to do new things without leaving what is traditionally understood to be painting, 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. Bizjak, on the other hand, I did not know. Their joint project "The Cardboard Hospital" brings us closer, from different formal approaches, to an architecture of paper, which is physical but also made of memory. That is what makes all the pieces that make it up so interesting, apart from their perfect formal resolution.

ARNULF RAINER

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

NORA AURREKOETXEA

The first time I was aware of seeing a work of Nora Aurrekoetxea was in the last edition of ARCO, in which she also won one of the prizes of 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 of the title (that means "eraztunak" in Basque) abandon their ornamental function and become a utilitarian structure. Or maybe not: what I really like most about this project is how mysterious it is, and that is why all possibilities are left open.