The Raven Row Gallery, one of London's most highly valued contemporary art spaces, will exhibit the work of Asier Mendizabal in the largest show devoted to the artist presented outside Spain.
Mendizabal explores the symbols through which the different cultures are represented. He has a particular interest in opposition and street sub-cultures, often defined by their adherence to such symbols. Mendizabal disassembles and re-imagines these symbols, questioning the relationship between cultural identity and cultural representation, and generating new forms of abstraction.
Asier Mendizabal works with a range of media, and this exhibition includes photographs, graphical works and photomontages, although its key dimension will be abstract sculpture.
In a text written to provide a context for the exhibition, Mendizabal has translated a letter by the artist Jorge Oteiza, addressed (but never sent) to the jury of a competition staged in 1952 by London's Institute of Contemporary Art, to select a monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner. Mendizabal reconsiders Oteiza's argument from a standpoint of radical abstraction in representing politics in art.