Aitor Ortiz: Entre arquetipos y artefactos – A Contemporary Art Exhibition at Museo Lázaro Galdiano

This exhibition showcases over 60 works by Aitor Ortiz, including photographs, sculptures, and installations, displayed across the Museo Lázaro Galdiano's spaces. The exhibition creates a dialogue between the technical and the artisanal, exploring material culture and the aesthetics of industrial production.

"Aitor Ortiz. Entre arquetipos y artefactos" presents a significant collection of over 60 works by the artist Aitor Ortiz, encompassing photographs, small and large-format sculptures, and installations. These pieces are strategically placed throughout the Museo Lázaro Galdiano's halls and gardens, engaging in a dialogue that bridges the technical and the artisanal. The exhibition invites reflection on the forces, volumes, and surfaces that have shaped our material culture and the aesthetics derived from contemporary industrial and productive processes. Ortiz's works often evoke a sense of melancholic, bare dystopia, featuring industrial remnants such as plates, frameworks, parts, and gears that, when extracted from their original context, become objects for evocation and perceptual challenge. The exhibition delves into the formal depuration characteristic of Ortiz's style, where objects gain the aura of archetypes, connecting with the materiality of industrial work and the marks of human labor. The pieces transition from documentary to conceptual exploration, and from archive to symbolic resonance, posing historical questions about the consideration of art, collecting, beauty, and exclusivity. This dialogue with the Lázaro Galdiano's collection highlights the transformation of objects over time and rescues the traces of practices that have defined our material culture. Ortiz states his interest lies in the spaces between the represented fact or object and its representation, and how we perceive it, moving beyond mere documentation of landscape transformations to evoke stripped-down scenarios free of ornament. Specifically, the exhibition features over 45 photographs from series such as Metaflora (2021), Estorninos (2020), Amorfosis (2015), and Net 010 (2012), presented as impressions on aluminum that convey classicism, timelessness, and mystery. Many of these photographs are in vertical format, emphasizing their sculptural quality, much like his large steel plate works from the Nóumenos (2013) and Vicinay (2018) series. The Vicinay series, created in the former Vicinay factory, captures imprints of chain production on steel plates. Complementing these are five recent sculptures from the Lanaval series (2025), made of patinated stainless steel, which play with volume, perspective, and form. Aitor Ortiz's broader practice involves space, architecture, and objects as starting points for visual and conceptual inquiries, focusing on the interplay between representation and perception, support, and mounting. His work has been recognized with awards like the Premio de Fotografía ABC and is represented by Galería Max Estrella.

Admission to the exhibition is included with the general museum ticket. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, from 9:30 AM to 3:00 PM, with extended hours on weekdays from 4:30 PM to 7:30 PM.