Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Zona Euro [Euro Zone]

Image caption
IGNASI ABALLÍ

Zona Euro [Euro Zone]

  • 2009
  • Digital print on photo paper mounted on aluminium
  • Cat. F_128
  • Acquired in 2010
  • Observations: Commissioned in 2008 to mark the 10th anniversary of the euro in Spain.
By:
Isabel Tejeda

The Banco de España commissioned Euro Zone (2009) by artist Ignasi Aballí to mark the tenth anniversary of the creation of the European Economic and Monetary Union on 1 January 1999. The euro, the EU currency that would replace the peseta, would become legal tender several years later in 2002. Aballí’s work was commissioned by José Maria Viñuela and would be exhibited in the corner Exhibition Hall overlooking the Cibeles Fountain. Euro Zone brought together the installation that now belongs to the Bank and other works, such as Paper Money (2007), monochromes using shredded banknotes of different values which are currently in the La Caixa Collection. This work seems to place Aballí among the artists who seek to minimalize painting, such as Kazimir Malevich, Yves Klein and Francesco Lo Savio.

The Euro Zone installation, a kind of visual poetry, continues the printouts that Aballí started in 1997. He collected press clippings, catalogued them into groups and then decontextualised and recomposed them in a different way.The piece combines information always citing amounts of currency, banners trimmed and arranged in rows to form a flag and apparently unconnected figures that refer to a numbers of workers, of the wealthy, of the unemployed, of tax payers and of entrepreneurs; formulas for measuring, naming and classifying the public financially. This is a new way of gathering signifiers that, as in pre-modern collections, provides unprecedented formulas for narrating what exists. The viewer is a fundamental part, as they must fill in the many gaps from their own experience. Thus, Aballí highlights the invisible elements that give meaning to money, to the consensus that one piece of paper is worth five euros and another of a similar size and material a hundred times more. As he himself explained, “I start from the poetic and end with political point-scoring”.

Within the collection, this installation was set up by Aballí himself with the help of Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos on an old back staircase of the Banco de España headquarters in Madrid. There are two panoramic lifts in the stairwells; as they take those lifts up and down, people can read the financial signs on the walls, which provide the bank with a further exhibition area.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Ignasi Aballí
Barcelona 1958

Ignasi Aballí studied Fine Arts at Barcelona University. At the end of the 1980s, he started to produce conceptual works using non-intervention strategies as regards his materials in order to question traditional art notions. The contingent and time components thus become decisive aspects of the result of the work, in a distancing that counterbalances the artist’s subjectivity and the manual component. He applies a highly controlled methodology and prior conditions that must not be altered. Aballí also uses linguistic concepts, mainly in relation to paintings, to create tensions between their elements and the classification terms and systems defining them. Another fundamental aspect of his work is his questioning of the mechanisms to depict the everyday used by the mass media by means of compiling, accumulating, classifying and serial presentation of photographs and press headlines. He then decontextualises them and turns them into abstract references, resulting in a distancing from the real and forcing the viewer to consider the complexity of the everyday and the range of nuances involved.

Aballí has taken part in international events such as the Sydney Biennale (1998) and the Venice Biennale (2007). His solo shows have been held at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2002 and 2015); the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2005); the Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2006); the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe, Germany, 2006); the Today Art Museum (Beijing, 2009); the Pinacoteca do Estado (São Paulo, 2010) and Atrium Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country (2012).

Roberto Díaz

 
«Spain and the Euro. The First Ten Years» (Madrid, 2009).
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.