IGNACIO URIARTE : BINARIES
UTAH MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SALT LAKE CITY, UT
MARCH 1 - JUNE 15, 2013
Spanish-born, Berlin-based artist Ignacio Uriarte obtained a degree in business administration and, naturally, pursued a career in an office environment. Throughout the day, Uriarte found himself intersecting the behaviors, textures, and languages of organizational culture with the strategies and tactics of Minimalism and Conceptual art. This unconventional path led him to a bilingual artistic practice that can be understood by anyone who has either stood in an art museum or occupied a cubicle.
UMOCA’s presentation of Binaries is an immersive survey into Uriarte’s research on the formal subjects of black and white, convex and concave, handmade and mass-produced as well as fundamental issues found in routine office environments. The works and the title are a reflection on the artist’s intersection of these two practices.
Uriarte describes his own practice as a “typology of the error,” a call-and-answer between man and technology and the constant battle to accomplish an objective perfectly despite inevitable impossibility. Overall, his work is defined by a relationship to familiar rituals, set standards and unconscious actions that are built into how we navigate daily life. The parameters for any given project are predetermined by the chosen medium’s limitations and Uriarte is merely the messenger exposing the available results.
“Uriarte’s work is problematically accessible: Everyone can see themselves, their rituals and their actions in these ironically neutral plays on minimalism,” says Senior Curator Aaron Moulton. “Suddenly procrastination, down time, looking busy, and daydreaming become viable methodologies for exploring conceptual mandalas and aesthetic situations.”
