9 April - 24 May 2016
The show includes a selection of works created by the artist between 2006 and 2016. The name of the exhibit, ITZALAK (which translates to "shades" in Basque) refers to "what the artist inevitably conveys through his body of work, traces of ideas, desires, references, perceptions and realities embodied in the material he is trying to control and grasp", as the artist himself explained.
Apart from the cast aluminium sculptures, the exhibit also features drawings and photographs where paint plays an important role. There is also a stunning wall painting on the main wall of the patio of the building housing the exhibition hall. The photographs depict images of his immediate environment, mainly his studio, where the elements that influence his works become evident, such as the structure and the use he makes of light, colour and space. Subsequently, he paints the photographs in an attempt to question the medium itself, but also to highlight and explain those aspects by suggesting ambiguous images with regard to what they actually represent and symbolize.
As for the sculptures, Irazu uses cast aluminium to produce copies of objects (chair, boxes, previous sculptures, rests of other constructions, etc.) that he puts together to create ensembles that are defined by their material heterogeneity. Then, the artist creates a new skin by applying paint to these ensembles, a material that he uses abundantly - particularly in his photographs - as part of his search for an extreme ambiguousness. Irazu conceived this project taking the architectural features of the gallery space into account.