Txomin Badiola
Bilbao 1957

Txomin Badiola was born in Bilbao. He studied Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, where he subsequently lectured from 1982 to 1989. He initially specialised in painting but soon switched to sculpture, becoming one of the most prolific exponents of what was known as ‘new Basque sculpture’. He began his career as an artist in the late 1970s and early 1980s with markedly minimalist, conceptual works. In that early period, he and two colleagues formed a group called EAE - Euskal Artisten Elkarten (‘Association of Basque Artists’) and engaged in political/artistic actions such as Action. The Museum, in which they planned the robbery of a sculpture by Oteiza from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. At the outset he was strongly influenced by the work and thinking of Oteiza. Indeed, he curated the exhibitions ‘Oteiza: Experimental Purpose’ at the Caja de Pensiones Foundation (Madrid, 1988) jointly with Margit Rowell, and ‘Oteiza: Myth and Modernity’ at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2004), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2005) and the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid, 2005). He also worked on Oteiza's catalogue raisonné.

Badiola has won several awards and distinctions including the Ícaro Award for the most outstanding artist of 1987 and the Delfina Trust Foundation Scholarship, which enabled him to live in London in 1988 and 1989. In the early 1990s he moved to New York, where he consolidated his critical and theoretical thinking about sculpture. He there broke away from the rigid formalism that then predominated in Basque sculpture, producing works using industrial materials hybridised with photography and audiovisual images. During his time there, Badiola established the foundations of his oeuvre and explored the constructivist and deconstructivist potential of materials without mythicising their physical properties. He moved away from the structural purity and rationality of minimalism and strove to go beyond sculptures as objects, through the concept of ‘poor form’. He came to constantly evoke dialectical play between present and absent space, between clarity and hermeticism of concept, in which elements combine to exert an attraction on spectators, who in turn seek to decipher symbols used in a fragmentary fashion. He still reflects on art and sculpture, as demonstrated by texts and catalogues such as Oteiza. Catálogo razonado de escultura [Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture] (2016), Capitalismo Anal [Anal Capitalism] (2014) and Hay veces que uno tiene que poner en escena su propio fracas [Sometimes One Has To Stage One's Own Failure] (2006).

His solo exhibitions include ‘Primer Proforma 2010. Badiola, Euba, Prego. 30 ejercicios, 40 días, 8 horas al día’ [‘First Proforma 2010. Badiola, Euba, Prego. 30 Exercises, 40 Days, 8 hours a day’] at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León (León, 2010), ‘La Forme qui Pense’ at the Museum of Modern Art in Saint-Étienne (France, 2007), ‘Malas formas, 1990-2002’ [‘Poor forms, 1990-2002’] at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum (2002-2003) and ‘Another Family Plot’ at the Palacio de Velázquez, Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid, 2016-2017).

Isabel Tejeda