Pablo Reinoso: Lines in Motion

Custot Gallery Dubai is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of French-Argentinian artist Pablo Reinoso in the region, titled Lines in Motion. First shown at the Abu Dhabi Art fair, a selection of existing and brand-new works merge together to create a comprehensive survey of Reinoso’s sculptural practice.

This exhibition serves to highlight the whimsical world of Reinoso’s sculptures, from his iconic Spaghetti Benches and Garabatos to his Frames, the works surpass their immediate function to take on a life of their own, elegantly taking possession of the gallery space.

For the series entitled Spaghetti Bench, Pablo Reinoso used public benches, which are anonymously designed and travel across cultures with an out-of-time, old-fashioned quality, as a starting point for his reflections. Started in 2006, these sculptures have multiplied and found homes in very diverse places. In line with his work on the Thonet chairs, the artist explores once again the seat as an object. Yet this time it is no longer the object but matter that frees itself from its function and pursues its fate of wood, tree, plant.

Reinoso stages benches that, after having accomplished their task as furniture, revert into growing, climbing branches. This freedom is expressed in a movement that embraces architecture, wondering throughout space.

The Frames series follows the same line as the Spaghetti Benches. Here frames start living a different life once their mission as “objects” has been accomplished. Pablo Reinoso works on the object as a painter does on the “still-life”, determining, for each work, whether the function is preserved or not. Sometimes the object ceases to be "usable" as such; other times, its incorporation into the artwork preserves its function entirely or partially.

The Garabatos, meaning ‘’to scrawl’’ is a series of seats, often of monumental scale, evoking the leitmotif of Pablo Reinoso’s work, namely, his desire to endlessly question by subverting reality, using materials or objects in ways that go against their customary use. The cold, rigid steel takes unprecedented shapes and dimensions that challenge constraints and play with the boundaries of impossibility.

BIOGRAPHY

Pablo Reinoso (born in Buenos Aires in 1955) is a French-Argentinian artist who has lived and worked in Paris since 1978. The artist’s practice encompasses sculpture, installation, design, architecture and painting, striving to challenge and extend the formal and conceptual boundaries of these mediums.

Since the 1970s, Pablo Reinoso has developed a body of works structured in series that address the notion of materiality, questioning and subverting the nature and limits of materials and techniques as diverse as wood, bronze, marble, steel, textile and air. His research also revolves around the ideas of object and functionality, whose relationship is constantly interrogated and reshaped through his works. By using materials as diverse as construction elements or existing objects from both architecture and design, his sculptures contribute to reconfigure these mediums’ primary functions, beyond their immediate context of use. Since the 2000s, the artist’s research has largely focused on the seating object through his series "Thoneteando","Spaghetti benches" as well as "Garabatos".

His work has been shown in international institutions and as part of major exhibitions, including the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Grassi Museum in Liepzig, the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Tokyo, the MUDAC in Lausanne, the CID - Centre for Innovation and Design in Grand- Hornu, the Venice Biennale, the FIAC Hors-les-murs, the Bienalsur or AGORA, the Bordeaux Biennale. His works are part of the collections of the MALBA and the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, the National Fund of Contemporary Art of Paris, the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, the MACRO Rosario and the MUSAC of Leon in Spain.