Alicia Martín’s multidisciplinary oeuvre has featured sculpture, photography, video, installations and drawing, though she is best known for and has had most impact with her three-dimensional work: sculptures, interventions in specific spaces and installations. In the 1990s she began to use books as both raw material and a reference point and image, and they have become a defining trait of her work.
As a centuries-old means of passing on knowledge, books are both a symbol and a material for sculptures in her works. She produces disorderly bookshelves in search of an order that is sometimes accidental and sometimes deliberate, but never based on known forms. She rejects conventional archiving systems, which she sees as out of date. This results in bibliographic labyrinths filled with unexpected encounters as she seeks to demolish assumptions hitherto considered as immovable, using balls, rings, cracks and vortices that embrace trees or show themselves timidly in a corner.
Her intervention at the Palacio de Linares in 2003 — a waterfall of books springing from a window and falling like a tongue to the street — is one of her most famous, most widely recognised works. This intervention was a turning point in the pace at which she drew up her projects and in her use of public space as a meeting point between her work and the public.
Her works can be found in the collections of the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Institute of Modern Art of Valencia (Valencia), the Museum of Castilla y León (León), the Centre for Contemporary Art of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela), the Patio Herreriano Museum (Valladolid), the Caldic Collective B.V. (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), the Voorlinden Buurtweg Museum (The Hague, the Netherlands) and the Library of Alexandria (Egypt).
Alicia Martín’s multidisciplinary oeuvre has featured sculpture, photography, video, installations and drawing, though she is best known for and has had most impact with her three-dimensional work: sculptures, interventions in specific spaces and installations. In the 1990s she began to use books as both raw material and a reference point and image, and they have become a defining trait of her work.
As a centuries-old means of passing on knowledge, books are both a symbol and a material for sculptures in her works. She produces disorderly bookshelves in search of an order that is sometimes accidental and sometimes deliberate, but never based on known forms. She rejects conventional archiving systems, which she sees as out of date. This results in bibliographic labyrinths filled with unexpected encounters as she seeks to demolish assumptions hitherto considered as immovable, using balls, rings, cracks and vortices that embrace trees or show themselves timidly in a corner.
Her intervention at the Palacio de Linares in 2003 — a waterfall of books springing from a window and falling like a tongue to the street — is one of her most famous, most widely recognised works. This intervention was a turning point in the pace at which she drew up her projects and in her use of public space as a meeting point between her work and the public.
Her works can be found in the collections of the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Institute of Modern Art of Valencia (Valencia), the Museum of Castilla y León (León), the Centre for Contemporary Art of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela), the Patio Herreriano Museum (Valladolid), the Caldic Collective B.V. (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), the Voorlinden Buurtweg Museum (The Hague, the Netherlands) and the Library of Alexandria (Egypt).